It’s April Fools day today and I feel a bit of a fool for taking such a long time to write anything in this blog. So I wanted to explain myself and to be honest about education, teaching and the use of IT.
Essentially, I haven’t had the time. How often had you heard that from a teacher? Time is precious and it seems to be moving faster as I get older. Albums I thought came out two years ago are issuing 10 year anniversary editions! That said, the purpose of this blog is to record my experience of using IT in 2008. My experience is that between the middle of January to the Easter holidays, IT takes a bit of a back seat to prelim creation, prelim marking, NAB marking, report writing, extended responses and extended essay first draft marking, parents evenings, estimates, pupil levels, SQA data collation and generally trying to get S4 – S6 through courses. I suppose this is the boring, administration aspect of the job (apart from getting the pupils through courses) that eats into time and, personally, saps energy. I find during this time, the pupils are the high point of the day. IT has been used. Of course it has. Apart from the usual IT use in class, the first week of the holidays saw pupils e-mailing their second and third drafts of their essays, which I have now marked and e-mailed back. This could be seen as an intrusion into my holidays, but I didn’t have to do it. I decided I wanted to do it because it would save me time when I went back. As I’m sure all teachers must feel nowadays, we seem to hit the ground running EVERY term now.
I have managed to purchase a camcorder and two new laptops for the department so more stuff to learn and play with!
