A Vision of Students Today

This is the video that we looked at in the first lecture, about students today.

It’s a great video 🙂

Motivating Students

I am currently teaching in a special ed school, which is both a challenging and rewarding experience. From my experience so far, I have gained a very different insight to teaching. The focus is completely different, the aim for achieving A’s is gone and transformed into preparing the students for the outside world after school. There is no pressure on them to achieve A’s, all we ask them to do is try their best. It is more about finding the best way that each individual student can learn. It reminds me of the quote “If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way we learn.” My experience has really made me look at how I teach and how I can transform the way I teach to help the students want to learn.

I found this week that the students are quite hard to motivate, they have this mindset that they cannot do something just by looking at it. One resource I found really inspiring was this poster. Next week I aim to get my students to move from the bottom step of “I won’t do it” up along the stairs so that they can learn to try and say “I can do this!”

Useful websites

Over the past few weeks I have been searching the web looking for fun and exciting ways to engage my students. There are so many different websites, but I found the most successful ones that helped my students really want to learn in the class were:

1. http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/

2. http://www.tpet.co.uk/#/home

3. http://www.twinkl.co.uk/

4. http://www.tes.co.uk/

5. http://www.senteacher.org/

All of these websites offer something different. Their resources are a godsend. They save so much time and really help you come up with different and exciting ways to teach in the classroom. I find them extremely helpful when it comes to differentiation in the classroom.

Educating the East End

One programme that I think teachers should definitely look at is “Educating the East End”. It is both humorous and interesting to see how schools work over in England. I have really enjoyed looking at the series.  Personally, I think documentaries about schools are vital because they help raise public awareness of the challenging work that teachers experience in schools. It also gives insight into the workload of teachers through Mr. Bispham and how teaching is not always plain sailing.

   

http://http://www.channel4.com/programmes/educating-the-east-end/on-demand/57812-001

Quote of the day

I really like this quote. I think it reminds us what a great teacher should be doing and how easy it is for people to fall into the bracket of being a mediocre teacher.

My First Blog Post

Welcome to my first blogpost. I’m just experimenting with it at the moment. 🙂