My Stuff

I have neglected my own blog over the past week mainly because I have been so busy pushing on with all my great inspirational ideas from SETT. Our school website is beginning to take shape with lots of great suggestions from the staff about how to give the children ownership of their class pages. I spent another productive afternoon with Susan working on our school blogs and on Thursday morning my Primary 5s were so excited to find they had 36 comments! Their enthusiasm was fantastic to see and I was particularly impressed to find some had gone home and got big brothers/sisters who are now at High School or in P6/7 to leave a comment. It really gave them an audience and they were so motivated. They couldn’t wait to go and leave comments on Kirklandneuk’s blog. The standard of their written French after only 7 weeks is just staggering! They insisted that I showed them how to add the accents because “it wasn’t right to miss them out, French people wouldn’t!” and they posted really full comments. What a motivator!
I have also begun gathering photos and information from each class for our first edition of Inchinnan Newscast which we will be filming, editing and, fingers crossed, posting on Wednesday, 25th October. This should be a great challenge for the children and I hope they will get loads out of it. I will post details when it is complete.
Enjoy your holidays all those teachers out there!

I had a meeting today with Susan Ronnie from Kirlandneuk PS about setting up our French blog between the two schools. It is great to be involved in this kind of collaboration and we both feel it will really benefit the children. Susan had found a great French podcast which she had encouraged her P5 French class to download and listen to on their mp3 players. The children loved this idea and were highly motivated to complete their homework!! Those who didn’t have an mp3 player were able to listen to it online.
So here we are, two enthusiastic Primary teachers with no real ICT training, apart from (me) a PostGrad in Educational Computing 8 years ago, really excited about setting up this new technology but the stumbling block for us is the understanding of how this new technology works and about html language, RSS feeds, tags, etc. It is a steep learning curve but one we feel really worth while. At least both of us can follow instructions from the help menus - just don’t ask us to repeat it on our own! We have set ourselves the task of linking our blog to Bubbleshare with pictures and audio this week and are meeting again next week to compare notes. Hey, we are nothing if not ambitious!! So please bear with us as we muddle our way through and thanks to all who have been leaving us comments.

I went on a great twilight course last night - Interview Skills with Shona Carmichael, Primary Consultation. Basically the aims of the course were to outline how to have a successful interview by having an understanding of what school management are looking for, how to answer questions and how to prepare. I thought this would be a useful course as I seem to have become less confident about interviews the older I get and, on a personal note, since I had my kids!! My friends tell me this is all part of motherhood, who knows?
Anyway, I duly went along not too sure what to expect and I was not disappointed. Shona pointed out that before you even think about applying for a job you need to consider why and examine your emotional intelligence. Daniel Goleman in his book “Working with Emotional Intelligence” defined this in five ways: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills. These formed part of a self-analysis questionnaire which we went through. Something that struck me in particular was the debate about strengths and weaknesses. I was lucky enough to see Dr Brian Boyd, co-founder of Tapestry speak at SETT06 on Unlocking Creativity: Teaching Creative Thinking and Learning. One of the points he made is that we must teach children to celebrate failure as this is a necessary part of learning and we must talk about it. I totally get that, both as a teacher and a mum. My 4-year old currently cries every time he loses a game and I am trying to teach him that it is a part of learning!! So when I was on my course last night, someone made the point that in the interview we are hyping ourselves up and therefore, do we really want to talk about our weaknesses? The answer has to be yes so we can move forward and make changes, but that in itself can be a challenge. Shona gave us a list of things easy to spot in others but not so easy to spot in yourself, such as unrealistic goals, power hungry. You can see bits of yourself in all of them which is the scary thing!! What I really liked was the suggestion that you go away and make a list of your strengths and weaknesses and then give it to someone at work, eg. your boss and see if they agree with you. Or if you are feeling really brave, your partner! I don’t think I’d quite manage that one, but it did prompt me to start a conversation with my boss about my strengths today. Haven’t quite got to the weaknesses yet, but c’est la vie!!