Professional Panel

Today as part of our PPL module, we had the opporunity to hear 5 presentations from 5 professionals working in schools. This panel consisited of a Head teacher, an Active Schools Co-ordinator, a Principal Teacher, a Probationer and Health and Wellbeing Development Officer. This provided a wide range of experiences, interests and expertise. Each person carried out a short presentation, covering aspects of the learner's journey, first year of teaching, eco-schools, extra-curricular activities in schools and promoting health and wellbeing in the primary school. It was a really worthwhile session and all gave excellent insight into working with children on a daily basis and helped us to overcome any worries or concerns. There was an electronic blog on the screen which allowed us to text in questions we wanted to ask and it was great to see that a lot of students were feeling the same as me, particularly the question that said "Since when will we have no weekends as probationers?!". The questions were well answered and it was a useful way of keeping our attention for three hours. It has overall made me excited for my future as a primary teacher and has encouraged me to keep on top of my professional development.

Using Prezi

I had meant to post a blog about this before Christmas but it was so chaotic and I was reminded about it today. We had to carry out a maths presentation on an aspect on the history of maths and I learnt that there were a lot of actual people behind mathematical discoveries that we used today without even thinking. Our group focused on the history of Archimedes and his theory of displacement. Laura who is also in our ICT elective class created a Prezi presentation, which was a very eye-pleasing way of displaying our information and the rest of the class were suitably impressed. This has taught me the effectiveness of transferrable skills within modules and areas of the curriculum and how important this is within a classroom situation. We learnt about Prezi in our computing elective but it can be used in a variety of useful ways as a teacher. This is a link to our presentation:

https://nemo.strath.ac.uk/owa/redir.aspx?C=33856e1694eb48299baf2c1540a5dc6b&URL=http%3a%2f%2fprezi.com%2fnv6avypsrwgo%2fpresent%2f%3fauth_key%3d6l530bt%26follow%3dyqtdyrahkiwu

Lack of blogging

I have learnt over the past month that I'm a terrible multi-tasker. It has been in my mind to update this blog but placement completely took over my life! I hope to improve this using my diary that I purchased, to plan out my weekly timetable and allocate myself time for each module, in order to keep up to date with all the work required of me! Fingers crossed it goes to plan!

Today was my first day in nursery and I although I enjoyed it, it felt a lot longer than a usual school day! I learnt a lot about responsive planning and how much of an influence pre-school children have on their own learning. The whole day was based around what the children wanted to do and I learnt that as a nursery teacher, you have to step back more and let children discover things for themselves. This is frustrating at first as I'm so tempted to ask questions and encourage them to engage in worthwhile activities! I'm sure as the weeks go on, I'll get a more used to it. But so far, being in school and teaching definitely seem to be more appealing! 

What I've learnt this week....

This week, I have learnt that even at the age of 20, I still 100% rely on my parents! I have tickets to go and see Bruno Mars tonight and last night at 8pm I decided to look out the tickets for me and my three friends which I couldn't find anywhere! I phoned home to my parents in Inverness who informed me that were lying in the kitchen drawer and there was no possible way of them arriving on time by post. As a result, My Dad has missed a day of work today to drive 3 hours to Glasgow just to deliver the tickets...then three hours back up the road again! As well as this, I completely ran out of money this week and owed my flatmates money for bills...had to phone the parents to bail me out! I might live far away from home and no longer be a teenager, but I still couldn't survive without my Mum and Dad!