Funny moments

Teaching in FE is always a challenge, and there seem to be more difficult days than easy ones.

I've had a few laughs today though.  Firstly, I quote a paragraph taken from one of my youngest FE students, who is talking about using Word's Spelling and Grammar checker:

Proof reading is good so that Michael does not make masitakes because of his bad seight and its also useful to binds curtain words to  write more paragraphs and things because it is very helpful if you are typing the same thing over and over again.

And then, from another student who is writing about the Welsh business, Braces Bread.  After having already put in his final assignment

#Fact I did not know that braces bread was a welsh company I think that is brilliant because it brings money into the welsh economy.

He went on to comment

they was the first British bread makers to sell their bread sliced which is a good thing because I’ve bought bread you have to cut yourself and I just mess it up all the time

An entertaining lot, aren't they?!

Interactive White Board

I've recently beeing working through our in-college Interactive White Board training programme.

I've found this to be of great benefit to me.  Whilst I have had training on the IWB, and had practiced using a variety of the tools that the IWB had to offer, I had not made extensive use of it in the classroom.  In fact, I thought I was doing quite well because I often get the students to come up and write on the board themselves and I've saved the odd file to put on Moodle afterwards.

However, doing the training reminded me to play with some of the more advanced features - recording the screen for example, or using the magic pen, changing the background and saving a series of pages as a PowerPoint presentation.  Having to evidence use of these tools in a real lesson made me think about how they might be useful, and I have definitely found this to be beneficial.  For example, I recently got a student to demonstrate how to add an icon to the desktop, and I recorded their actions.  I then saved this file and uploaded it to YouTube so that I could embed it into their Moodle pages.  Now they can remind themselves how to add an icon to the desktop, even when I'm not there.

This ability to extend the classroom time is something I will endeavour to do much more in the future, as it also means that those who miss the lesson, or found it particularly difficult, can revisit what was covered in their own time, and as often as they need to.