Excited To Be Back In The Classrrom

Am a wee bit tired right now but feel I have neglected my blog for too long. It has been a bit strange being in one place, but really exciting engaging with the apparent continuity in dialogue with students from around school over the past three days. It feels like I haven't been away, and today I visited think.com for the first time since we returned to find stickies from students, and emails already awaiting reply. It seems last year's subject specialist role really did make an big impact.

Several students have asked when I will be teaching ICT. I don't think it has quite sunk in yet that I have a class of my own and won't be with them as I much as I was last year. However the continuity they seek is a cue to think about how we extend the engagement and obvious excitement that this opportunity began. We often encounter a holiday lag, the stuff that the students have forgotten over the break, but this was not evident in the mind of one of our new Y3 students whose first question on Wednesday was, "when are we going to finish our me pictures? " a reference before she had taken her coat off and said good morning to the digital photography work we had started, but were unable to complete by the end of last term.

Our year group blogs should be beginning anew this week, as some colleagues have begun developing rotas, and planning these into the weekly cycle of class based ICT. Can't wait to see what develops, as I will be introducing my class to this process for the first time tomorrow, as a learning log initially.

We have also begun timetabling regular use of 2 Type, to develop routines and use of the classroom ICT area, and promote keyboard skills. The students are loving this tool, and really trying to follow the colour coded fingering activities, that are challenging them within the games presented.

Since we are going to be using and learning about text formatting as a focus for our ICT unit this term, the first three weeks of our Literacy Program is being developed around Poetry and Calligrams, to promote the "available designs" the students will need during desktop tasks to enable engagement with the tasks to be developed on screen. We have also renamed the ICT Unit poems and calligrams, and are in the process of labelling and developing the ICT area as a Writing space, for this term, focusing purpose for tool through the curriculum context in which it will be used. Our intention is that next term it become an editing suite, as we try to link our writing unit on Chronological reports through a Tudor theme to creating scripts for a podcast or vodcast using Podium and/or photostory, whilst developing small group work on Garageband to create short music clips for use in the files we develop.