Handing over the reigns

Since October teachers have been handing over their classes to me and trusting me to teach them as well as giving me the opportunity to learn how to teach.

I am currently coming to the end of my training and have decided to hand over the reigns to my students. I am not doing it completely,  they wont have to research the topic they have to teach but they will have to do some prep work.

I will be handing some of my Year 10 class the responsibility of teaching their class mates prime factor decomposition,  highest common factor and lowest common multiple.

This is going to interesting for me and the class teacher and probably quite eye opening for the pupils who are teaching. I wonder if they will feel the same frustration when class mates don't listen to their explanations as teachers can some times feel when pupils zone out in lessons.

Who knows maybe they will discover a passion for teaching! I will let you know

A :)

The Significance of Twitter

So I haven't been very good at updating this blog or posting as often as I would like. I would like to say that I was off doing all sorts of exciting stuff, but really sometimes its just that I get caught up in life that I forget to take a break to do this. I promise I will get better, at some point!

Twitter is a wonderful tool. You can follow teachers, education blogs, TES resources and you can see trending topics all over the world. There is even websites that will give you a real time feed of tweets and create a heat map! Opens the door for all sorts of interesting discussions.

Toady I used social media for the first time in a lesson. I saw the idea on a resouce on TES and decided to spruce it up a bit. Twitter has had a face lift since the original resource was up loaded.

My year 7 lesson today was all about rounding and significant figures, and instead of just listing numbers on the board and asking them to be rounded to the nearest 10,100, or 1000 or to so many significant figures I looked at something I do in every day life.

I don't know about you, but when I am shopping I never accurately keep track of how much I am spending, I always work with rounded figures. This aspect of life made up the first part of the lesson. We looked at shopping for a PS4 and how much it would roughly cost and how rounding could leave us quite close to the real answer, or quite far away (£30 out by the time we finished rounding!)

However it was the next part of the lesson that I enjoyed the most, and the pupils did too. It kept them engaged for the last 20 minutes of the lesson and they happily worked through the associated questions. 

We looked at various famous people on twitter and rounded their followers, tweets and the number of people they follow to a given number of significant figures. It opened the door to debate over what was the ideal number of sigfinicant figures to round to and what was most realistic when we compared rounded answers to actual values. This aspect really allowed the pupils to se why some times rounding to significant figures can be slightly more usful than just rounding. 

The class had so much fun completing this activity that they have requested it as a starter for the next lesson and given me suggestions for more famous people to look at. 

Here is the powerpoint I used for the lesson

http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Twitter-Significant-Figures-6340265/

A :)

Planning to Plan

When I first started the PGCE training course planning was easier in the sense that we had less of it to do. It has got a lot harder since then as the volume of lessons to be planned has increased. I now find myself planning to plan lessons and getting myself rather lost in the plans.

The other aspect of planning that was and still is hard, was focusing on what was important within the individual lessons and over the course of a topic. Recently I discovered something that makes that a whole lot easier.

Motivation

This post is mainly about my motivation, both for this blog and for teaching. A blog is always something I intended to do and I just never found the time. However now with a new found motiviation and passion I intend to start and keep this blog up to date with both teaching ideas and general rambling. :)

As a trainee teacher, and I suppose all teachers in general, we are constantly thinking about ways to motivate students into wanting to learn all the interesting bits and bobs within the Pandora's box that is mathematics.

This is fairly accurate

However it is not always the pupils that need motivation, sometimes the teachers do to! This was something I recently discovered much to my disappointment. I found myself completely demotivated and not really wanting to teach due to various different circumstances. 


Then I met someone, and this someone made me think, about all types of motivation.