Returning to the semi-public forum of reflection after a week or so reflecting on the progress of my students during the second half of the year... feeling a bit rusty, bear with me.
This end of the year seems to be evaporating with even more vigour than previous years. There seems so much to do, so many plans to put in place, and yet no time in which to do these with any real success.
Aims for next year, teaching in a new area of the school:
- reflection as part of the weekly (if not daily) curriculum, as captured by blog. Am undecided if I will pursue the Ultranet for this or another forum such as this fine one right here.
- using Evernote as an observation tool, with thanks to @piratepete.
- collaboration by students using Google Docs to work together on a task, with thanks to @rmbyrne (follow this guy on Twitter, and his Free Tech 4 Teachers website) among others.
- explore more rich tasks such as responding to blog posts, online setting and submission of learning tasks (when Ultranet is 'fixed'), and having students set their own questions
- digital forms of assessment such as videos and narrated examples, will be investigating VoiceThread for this.
- the Big6 research strategies for better searching of the internet rather than relying on Google's first two pages of results.
- define and develop a Scope and Sequence chart for ICT skills at primary school that both incorporates VELS and has useful skills in a Web 2.0 environment.
So... simultaneously thanking and cursing Twitter - there are so many great ideas out there, that in a given day I am able to collect only a sample, read and investigate a fraction of these, and implement only a couple of that smaller subset.
Still - one step forward is still an advance. I will be relating my progress as it happens or doesn't happen. Keep me honest!