This is my Google Teacher Academy application video. For more information on 20% time in my classroom please visit this blog post, our class blog and Adeel’s Rubik’s blog. Fingers crossed, I couldn’t apply last time around as it clashed with my wedding!

Oh No Mr Gove!

And just like that, world order is restored. I felt a little uncomfortable praising Mr Gove for his radical move to remove the ICT Programme of Study.

But all is back in balance now.

As MSN reports:

“The Education Secretary has called for longer school days and suggested that teachers should also be happy with longer terms.

Michael Gove said “we’re all in favour” of extending the school day and potentially also cutting short the summer holidays.

Asked about how this would impact on teachers, he told ITV’s Daybreak programme: “If you love your job then there is, I think, absolutely nothing to complain about in making sure you have more of a chance to do it well.”

Really Mr Gove?

Let’s take a look at my last week in teaching:

  • Saturday (Xmas Hols) - 3 hours (mainly planning lessons)
  • Sunday (Xmas Hols) - 5 hours (mainly whole school data analysis to make sure we’re on track to do well in the league tables)
  • Monday (07.30-22.00) - 14 hours (teaching, meetings, planning, supervising break, research)
  • Tuesday (07.30-18.00) - 10.5 hours (teaching, leading) + (19.00-22.30) 3.5 hours (learning & sharing)
  • Wednesday (07.30-21.00) - 13 hours (teaching, marking, supervising lunch, meeting, leading, reflecting on your policy decisions)
  • Thursday (07.30-20.00) - 12.5 hours (teaching, planning, supervising lunch, analysing data, meeting, parents evening)
  • Friday (07.30-15.00) - 7.5 hours (teaching, more data, more meetings, more duties)

That’s 69 hours.

And that’s an average week.

Where appropriate I’ve removed 30 mins for eating dinner at home. I’ve not had a lunch break, nor a ‘break of reasonable length’ during the day. We work these hours, for 5-8 weeks at a time, and then we collapse, speak to our loved ones and sleep for about half of our holidays, before spending the second half preparing work for the next term.

If you want people like me to run your schools, to innovate new ICT curricula and share them across the country, to make sure my school does well in it’s league tables and receives another Outstanding in it’s next, no-notice, Ofsted inspection, oh yes - and to teach, what exactly should I stop doing?

And all this whilst paying me less? I don’t think so. According to the NUT’s pension calculator, if your proposed changes go through, and if I were to make it to 60 years old, doing my bit to fill the upcoming Headteacher shortage, and then decided to retire at that age. I would be £750,000 worse off. Three quarters of a million pounds worse off.

This does not compute.

I do love my job. But I couldn’t do any more of it. If you asked me to, I’d leave the classroom immediately, and that would be a shame.

Source: MSN

FizzBuzz CodeYear Fun #schoolstech

With todays announcement from Mr Gove it seems a good point to reflect on my first steps on a year long coding journey. I spent my Tuesday evening completing the first week of lessons on the brilliant CodeYear. It took me about an hour and a half and was a great little introduction to Javascript. First week covers defining variables, basic arithmetic, and moves on to if/then/else/while statements.

It’s an interesting learning model, there are hints at each stage and I didn’t find myself stuck on too many occasions. If you teach ICT or Maths then I’d thoroughly recommend you take a look at it. It was quite a challenge and I’ll be interested to see how far students could get without a teacher to help them. If they do get stuck, some good Googling skills would help them find a way forward pretty quickly. It’s not a replacement for a skilled teacher thought, but that’s a conversation for another post!

The final bonus challenge is to write a FizzBuzz program that writes out a set of consecutive numbers, but replaces multiples of 3 with “Fizz” and multiple of 5 with “Buzz” and of course, multiples of both with “FizzBuzz”. It’s a great little challenge that the Maths teacher in me loved!

I’ve been encouraging staff and students at school to join me on this journey so it’ll be interesting to see how many are up for the challenge.

Here’s my final FizzBuzz code in case you’re interested or stuck:

// Ask user how far we should Fizz Buzz for
var Total = prompt("How far shall we fizz buzz?");

// for the numbers 1 through to Total,
for (i=1; i<=Total; i++) { 

  // if the number is divisible by 3, write "Fizz"
  if ( i % 3 === 0 ) { 
    // unless the number is also divisible by 5, then write "FizzBuzz"
    if ( i % 5 === 0 ) {
    console.log("FizzBuzz");
    }
      else 
        console.log("Fizz");
  }

  // if the number is divisible by 5, write "Buzz"
  else if (i % 5 === 0 ){
    console.log("Buzz");
  }

  // otherwise, write just the number
  else {
    console.log(i);
  }
}

Has anyone written this in a neater, purer way? I’d love to see it if you have.

EDIT:

I have to include this, a solution in a tweet by Martyn Colliver:

#BETT2012 In Lists

For the first time in about four years I won’t be visiting BETT this year in London. For the un-initiated BETT is an enormous educational technology trade show / conference held at Olympia in London each January.

Things I’ll miss:

  • Bumping into other educators I know from Twitter etc.
  • Attending some of the fringe events e.g. Teachmeets.
  • Seeing some of our existing partners who we currently source products from.
  • Seeing the personal friends who I stay with when visiting.

Things I won’t miss:

  • Being harassed at every turn by a salesman.
  • Walking round and round and round and round.
  • Queuing to put my coat in.
  • Searching for some phone/wifi signal.
  • Buying over priced snacks.
  • Seeing the latest 3D screen / projector / TV.
  • Seeing the latest amazing developments in the world of Interactive Whiteboards.
  • Seeing the latest and greatest VLE.
  • Seeing the latest….. oh you get the idea!
  • Sleeping on a sofa-bed to save money for school (although see point 4 in the positives).
  • A bag full of useless freebies - seriously I got some 64Mb USB sticks last year - who knew they even made them so small still?!?

Things I’ll do instead:

  • Keep up on anything valuable I’ve missed via Twitter hastags and people’s blogs.
  • Ask companies to come and see me personally at school if we think we want to work with them.
  • Teach my Year 11s on the run up to their exams.
  • Save school a chunk of money.
  • Look to visit some schools that are leading on areas that we are planning to develop.

In this day and age, unless you have a bunch of projects on the go and products to buy then it’s hard to justify attending BETT. I’m speaking from the viewpoint of a teacher / school leaders / IT coordinator here, I know if you’re working in the industry it’s useful to have everyone under one roof. But as educators, in this day and age, you should be able to see and hear all about the latest and greatest tools for learning online as and when they appear on the market. And you should be able to hear this from real teachers who are really using the products with real children - that beats sales patter any day of the year!

Will you be attending BETT? What do you hope to get out of the show?

Secondly, never make any comment about your work, about your employer, about teaching issues in general.

Jim Docherty, assistant secretary of the SSTA, getting it all wrong.

Please don’t listen to him. Speak your mind, share your ideas. And like I always tell my pupils, think before you post. Common sense not scare-mongering.

Which reminds me I have a policy to write for staff to include this. Does anyone have any good exemplars? I’d like to keep it simple as we did with our Learner’s AUP.

Source: BBC