Jon Hoff’s Teaching ICT (PGCE year)

Here’s a poster I used as a focused discussion for Year 10’s studying for their OCR nationals ICT option. It was meant to be a starter but ended up being an hour long activity.

After a feedback session students wrote their own ICT acceptable use policies for the school. Some sensible ideas arose about the issues of having useful educational resources such as You Tube banned in school. It is certianly a subject that got them talking on topic.

Home from the first day of my first placement on the PGCE ICT.

It was an interesting day. Certainly I enjoyed the biting humour in the staff room at lunch time, the fantastic tongue-in-cheek cynicism that weathered secondary school teachers acquire (and need) to survive. The school is an all boys that has around a 50% A-C GCSE pass rate. Fairly typical. I am really going to have to impose on the classroom, drawing on all my experience of keeping rowdy classes of teenagers in order. However, the nature of these students is slightly different to what I have taught before. They are English. This may require new strategies. I am fearful as well that a trainee teacher is forever in his or her mentors shadow and never able or feeling able to break entirely free and flex their teaching styles as they wish to.

I have decided to do my Microlesson (a five minute expose to be presented to peeps at Uni) on delicious, in other words, social bookmarking. I’ve already been booked in to present this to two Year Ten classes who have just looked at bookmarks in browsers on their OCR course. My cross curricular presentation on the potential support ICT can provide in Geography is also nearly finished, I’ll embed it here ASAP. I have used sliderocket for this one, and have had a mixed experience. For a while I was trying to screencast a tour of Google Earth and then embed it in the presentation. My machine just does not have those kind of capabilities! GE Pro has a movie making facility but I am not paying $400 for the pleasure. I’ll just do a live tour of the software. I need that one trillion bit connection to be available through Virgin sooner rather than later…

Are there any other PGCE trainees ICT or otherwise out there? How is your course going so far?