School’s not out in Malawi!

It shows how busy that last term was that I have not blogged since April, and it was not just with work at the Advisory.  There was the running and trying to get ready to go away as well.  I had so much I wanted to write about but never got round to it.

So now all of  a sudden the session is finished and I fly to Malawi at 6am on Thursday morning so it’s off to Edinburgh tomorrow night to relax with some of last years global teachers before Clare and I go off to the airport.

Two weeks there and then it’s off to Nairobi  to meet my husband (if he can manage to get himself there!*) and then then the next day it’s off  to Tanzania to climb Kiliminjaro, before returning to Nairobi for a few days camping safari on the Masai Mara and then three days in Nairobi.

*Not only do I organise everything when flying etc so he has never had to organise anything but he also has a broken foot!  That’s what you get for running the West Highland Way race last week in 18hrs 42mins and coming in 7th place!  He actually ran at least half the race with it broken and is now in a cast, causing me even more stress about Kili!  I have some people willing to cut the cast off for me if the hospital don’t take it off in time for him flying.  It’s going to be sore while we climb!

It’s been a real stress getting ready and that is with a few days holiday to prepare, I don’t know how I did it last year, leaving before the end of term.  My bags are full and yet I have not finished packing yet – mostly my own clothes left to go in so I won’t be changing much!

I will try to twitter a bit (very limited mobile phone coverage though) and my twitter username is CarolineGibson.  Hubby might update this blog a bit as well before he leaves for Nairobi and I will do a full write up afterwards.

Terrifed and excited at the same time

Tomorrow will see me run my first ultra-marathon the 53 mile Highland Fling from Milngavie to Tyndrum.  I have been terrified all week but am just beginning to feel excited today.  The thought of the amount of money I have raised so far is going to be one of the things that keeps me going, along with the terror of maybe having to say to people I DNF!  Plus my dad will be pushing out of the checkpoints if he has too!

I have had a few school glow visits this week but be far the most part of my week has been spent working on outcomes, namely putting them into formats to be distributed to all schools in SLC.  This has included making small documents, transition documents and single level documents.  Exciting stuff!!!!!!!

Glow, gaming and holidays.

I had a good few mentor visits to schools during the last couple of weeks of term.  They were mostly positive with some great work going on, particularly in one school.  This is not to say there are not schools where is limited activity but there are usually reasons for that.  One school for example is having problems with seemis codes etc and this is hampering progress a bit for various reasons which are not the fault of the glow mentor.

Time is really the problem for everyone as mentors are often not getting time out to develop things with budgets the way they are.  Plus if I visit other members of staff they are using their CCC time or I am meeting them after school which eats into their preparation and marking time.  This is just the way things are and we have to work round it unfortuntately.

One school I love going to is going to is doing fabulous things and the glow mentor said she felt it was embedded throughout the school.  Factors for this would be the enthusiasm and dedication of the glow mentor, the interest of the staff and the huge backing given to it by the head teacher.  This is a school incidentally where the mentor gets an afternoon out a week to work on glow, and other ICT things as well I think!  When I did an inservice training session there the HT was the last one still working on her glow group and was highly enthusiastic.  She takes a level E reading group and has a glow group set up for them so that if she is not able to take them, which must happen quite often, she can leave work for them on glow and they can post work etc to her.   This is just one example of the great things they are doing.

I also had another visit to one of the smaller schools I go to, which has 2 classes and a joint headship with another school of similar size.  The mentor there only started doing it this year and only works part time.  They only have 2 computers that are fully functioning, and one very old, very slow on the internet laptop and although the  mentor had set up a group to work on with the class on a current topic she found it hard to get anything sustainable going on with such a small number of computers.

I came up with the idea, partly after having been at the previous school I mentioned, to have a language glow group that they could have work on for their different reading groups and then it would be in more manageable numbers.  We set up one page with the Learnnewsdesk webpart and a discussion web part so that a task a week could be to write in their own words about a piece of news.We then set up a writing page with just a documents store and a discussion page so that sometimes pieces of writing could be uploaded and pupils could do two stars and a wish for each other.  This would maybe work best with story starters, or just character description etc.  These two ideas came from Lesley and Karen-Ann’s great 10 steps glow group.  We then set up a page for each reading group and just put discussions, documents, web links and picture library into it so that with the novels each group are doing next term they can have their space for work etc.  One task for each group per week could be to go in and complete a task set by the teacher.  I am looking forward to seeing how this works and am going back to help with the teacher and the pupils a little while after the holidays.

SLC are investing in some gaming materials just now and have already done some workshops for head teachers etc.  After the summer we will have various consoles etc to loan out to schools to use with the curriculum in some way.  I now presently have at home a Nintendo DS with brain training and Professor Layton, a wii with the sports and the guitar hero rock band package.  At some point we should also be getting Endless Ocean and another one that I cannot pronounce never mind spell!  We are having a try with them just now to see how we could help schools to think about how we would use them in the curriculum.

I have never been into gaming really and so felt a lot better when I read in the article in the Scotsman on Ollie Bray  that he had never been into it either until a couple of years ago!   I am really enjoying the DS brain training and have played a bit of the wii, although what I really want is the wii fit which I have tried before and think is great.  I certainly can’t get one until after Kiliminjaro though!  I have had a go on guitar hero before but I was so, so rubbish!  I am having a couple of 13 year old friends to stay next week so we will get that out then and I will try again.  One plays guitar and one plays drums so it’s perfect for them!  They already have the guitar hero so I am looking forward to seeing what they think of the rest of the package and getting some ideas from them about how to use it in school!  That’s inbetween climbing Ben Lomond, going on a 15 mile cycle, taking them to my running club for a track session and possibly doing some indoor climbing!  They are pretty active and will beat me at everything hands down!

Shamed

I was running the blogging part of my blogging and wiki course again this week, twice, and was ashamed that I had not posted in so long as the attendees were using my blogroll to get to others.  I resolved to post that night (Monday) and yet here I am on Sat morning just getting round to it, although about two hours later than planned after catching up on loads of other peoples blogs and finding some great new ideas, especially new wikis that I can show at the wiki part of the course next week.

I have just felt too busy to blog even though I have had loads I could have written about this term.  I have been keeping my running one up to date as it is my training diary as well as a blog and so it has taken priority.

Work has been super busy, but brilliant, I have been trying to train for these crazy running races I am doing (which are getting frighteningly closer) and I this last couple of weeks I have travelling around the country a bit and organising my summer!

In the last two weeks I have been in Inverness, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow at a series of networking events for International Education masterclassers and others like global teachers and link schools.  I was there with the charity LINK that I went to Malawi with to highlight the glow group I am working on with them which will be primarily for global teachers and link schools but obviously for anyone else who wants to join as well.  It will sit within national international education glow group and one of the things I was doing was gathering resources from people to share within the group.

Glow was one of the things brought up quite often, especially when in the afternoons the groups split into their local authority groupings with some QIO’s present by this point.  It was fascinating to hear what different councils thought of Glow, obviously based on the experiences that they had to date and what stage their council were at in rolling it out.  It made me realise just how far SLC and other early adopters like Dundee had come when I when I came into contact with authorities who were at the very beginning stages.  I did feel bad talking about sharing resources and ideas etc on Glow when some teachers still seem very far away from getting a glow account.

There seem to be many different ways of rolling it out within authorities and I am not even going to pretend to begin to understand the work needed in setting up the infrastructure for local authorities when they sign up. However with the amount of content now on the national site both in terms of resources and in glow groups  it seems unfair for teachers not to at least get their username and password so that they can access the national site, even if nothing else is available for them at a school or local authority level.  I  did hear of this happening a bit in one council but I am sure there are very good reasons for it not happening too!

I had three brilliant days of co-operative learning training recently and have since been anxious to try it out with a class, particularly since I am now expected to deliver training on it.  So I asked at Castlefield and will be trying it out with a class who are particularly in need of some social skills!  I was amazed at the training at the things I thought I had been doing well in group work that were really just scratching surface and I now feel really enthused to try out things ‘properly’ like think, pair, share and peer teaching as just two examples.  I would previously have said I was doing these things, but now have an entirely new take on them!

I am going to tie in this work with Malawi.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  My school has recently become an official link school with the school I was in in Malawi (Gwengwe Primary) but I was was not feeling terribly enthused as I was unsure of how to take it forward when I was not actually there.  Going into the school this week to talk to the SMT about it and getting their support has helped, as did going to all of the networking events and getting ideas and the fact that just this week, after huge amounts of time on the phone, I have booked flights and trips for the summer.

I am going to Malawi for 2 weeks with one of the other teachers from the programme last year.  We are doing this independently although since we are both link schools the folk from LINK out there will give us a hand getting to our schools, either themselves or by arranging transport for us.  I am then leaving and going back to Nairobi to then travel to Tanzania and climing Mount Kiliminjaro.  I was talking about this last year so I had the idea before I knew about the celebs doing it!  I paid attention to what they did to prepare though and have watched the programme twice now so it was actually useful that they did it first!  In fact it persuaded me into spending yet more money to do a longer trek and not just doing the quickie, cheaper one to the top which you have less chance of getting to the top with anyway!  Not that I was trying to cut corners but with a brand new kitchen and huge total costs for this trip in total I was a bit worried!  When I saw how slowly Fearne Cotton was wallking and how much of a struggle it was for her I thought I would pay atttention!

Travelling back to Nairobi after that and going onto the Masai Mara for a three day camping safari and finishing with a couple of days in Nairobi.

The Kiliminjaro trek is partly to help raise funds for the teachers house I am raising money for in my village.  I am looking forward to going out and telling them that I am doing this for them and hopefully I will be past halfway by that point with a further very generous sum to come from someone if I make it to to the top of Kili.

I had sent letters asking about coming to stay again which unfortunately never arrived and so I had to text and ask but I got lovely texts back from my head teacher saying they would love to have me back:

“Caroline, your message has answered the dreams of a lot of people here.  They were asking me to call you and have a visit at Gwengwe school,  but I had nowhere to start.  Come and visit us.  You are most welcome.  The village headsmen, the family and all the teachers want to see you again.  The DEM and PEA say you are most welcome.  I am Jimu”

I since then asked them what they wanted to work on while I was there and they said english grammar, alphabetical order, global map, phonics and other things for maths.  Now despite my A at English higher I would not say my english grammar was the best and neither would my dad whenever he proof reads my assignments.  I am also not convinved that should really be a priority but I am going to keep thinking of it in terms of infants and maybe things like sentences and simple ideas of verbs, adjectives etc.  I would like to do more this year where I worked in english but the teachers helped the pupils to do it in Chichewa so they have a better understanding.

I would like to take out really simple jolly phonics books as well as teachers guides and other picture books and loads of other resources.  I will have to buy gradually over the next few months since I am already spending so much on the trip as a whole.  As part of the co-operative learning teaching I will try to enthuse the class I am working with at Castlefield to do things/make things/write to Malawi and work with the rest of the school to raise awareness and get behind the link and my visit.

More to follow on all of this after the holidays and a couple of questions to finish this one.

I signed up to twitter but have not really got into posting although I do log in and see what other people are saying.  It is blocked at work and I do not have present have internet access on my phone, although not sure if I can change this.  Can I send ordinary texts to twitter that would go on the web – that would be useful, and I hope interesting, when I was in Malawi again.  It was hard enough getting phone reception though never mind internet access so I doubt I would be able to do it through the internet even if I had it on my phone. 

Also I have been trying for a while to put powerpoints on slideshare, to then put on glow – it looks so nice!  These are all to do with Malawi and are reasonably big with lots of photos.  I am having terrible trouble getting them onto slideshare and just wanted to check if this was down to the photos and size of them – if it is I will just have to split them into smaller sections.

Catching up

I thought that with doing those lessons on literacy I would feel I had teaching to write about and would keep this up to date but obviously so many other things have got in the way that I have been too busy to keep this up.  I have really  been trying to focus on my running blog lately to help me keep going with that as the 53 mile Highland Fling race from Milngavie to Tyndrum is only 11 weeks away now!  I am starting to wonder how I am going to keep going for about 12 hours!  

I did 5 lessons in a primary 5 class on Lets Think Through Literacy.  The p.5’s were definitely at the bottom end of the age group for these activities and the ideas were very typical of that age.  When we had the training day we actually did some of the lessons as if we were pupils and had some great ideas and really got into it.  I think this may have given my too big ideas of what to expect from children as their ideas were nothing like ours!  Maybe if I did it with p.7 it would have been slightly different.  I was pleased to be in this class though as the teacher was really enthusiastic and followed and took notes through every lesson.  She was definitely the type who thought that children should be given the chance to use drama and talking and listening to gain in confidence and she could see big differences in some of the pupils from the beginning to the end.  I am looking forward to running some CPD on this next year and getting teachers to do this in the same kind of way we did at the training.

And then I started doing lessons in a secondary!

I was looking at shoo fly resources and as I am going to be running CPD on that next year as well I thought I had better pilot some lessons on this.  This resource had specifically been given to a secondary to try and I was working with the PT of the English department when I suggested I do a series of lessons which he watches and then he does a series that I can watch. 

I chose to do the poetry work as it is one of my weaker areas so I thought I would challenge myself but it was also probably the piece of writing the children would find most interesting as it was a bit scary and was entitled ‘A Gothic Tale’.  The resources can be used on the interactive whiteboard or viewed through power point, which was what we had to use. 

It was a first year class, and although I have done a lot of Malawi work with classes from 1st to 6th year this was my first time at trying out teaching at secondary level and it’s fair to say I was a bit worried!  The class are an absolute dream though, I would have loved to have them in p.7.  The things we could have done!

So we spent time on the poem, wrote a synopsis and researched gothic culture and history so far.  Tonmorrow we will write a poem and then on Wed they will put it onto powerpoint like the original poem and make it look gothic.

I have really enjoyed working with the class and find secondaries fascinating but being stuck to a timetable is very restricting and I am not sure I would want that all the time while teaching.   50 – 55 mins is not very long to discuss things and get the associated work done and I have felt I, and the children, are just getting into things properly when it is time to stop.  And that is with a wonderful class where the behaviour and the work ethic was as close to perfect as you get.  With Curriculum for Excellence schools are definitely going to have to look at timetabling, as I know some are, so that pupils can go into a particular topic in more depth and not be restricted by time.  It made me realise how lucky we were in the primary if we were given the freedom to be loose with the timetable and spend longer on subjects/topics the children were interested in and that consquently generated more learning.

Teaching Thinking

I have just started a series of lessons with a primary 5 class (not in my own school) to pilot the first few lessons from the ‘Lets Think through Literacy’ pack.  I was quite nervous before I went as it was in a different school, I feel I have not taught anything (except for Glow) for ages and the teacher would be staying in with me.  In fact it turned out to be the deputy head! 

It was fine though, although there was not as much discussion as I would have liked but I think this was partly because the class did not know me and it was so different for them and that I think p.5 were really at the bottom end of it being appropriate for them.  They found it quite difficult, although I have not looked at their answers to the question yet on what they found easiest and what was most difficult.

Fundraising challenge 1…….Done!

last lap!

Edinburgh Triathlon – despite being absolutely terrified before the start I enjoyed this today and will be signing up for another one in June!  I surprised myself with how I did, considering how little training I had and look forward to improving on it.  Bring on the training for the Highland Fling now!

New Year – New Challenges for Justgiving

Tomorrow (New Years Day) I will be completing (hopefully!) my first challenge of the year to raise money for the school I worked in in Malawi.

I wish to raise money to build a teacher’s house in the village so that there can be another qualified teacher employed in the school.  At the moment there are 7 classes, with only three qualified teachers and 3 volunteer teachers.  These qualified teachers include the head teacher and the deputy head teacher.  The PEA (Education advisor for the area) would also like Gwengwe Primary and one or two others in the area to be extended to have the full 8 stage classes they should have so this is another reason for needing another qualified teacher.  With these schools going up to St8 this would also mean the possibility of a secondary school being built in the area which would be of benefit to many.  I believe then that the building of a teacher’s house would be a sustainable thing to do for the village and surrounding area.  Teachers do not generally like to work in rural areas and female teachers are often tied to what/where their husbands are working but a teacher’s house being available does help to encourage them to rural areas.

Castlefield Primary have just established a link through the organisation Link Community Development that I was in Malawi with and they will be helping with some fundraising but it is a relatively small school and I would neither want, nor expect, that they would make any more than a contribution. 

I am going to try out a couple of new challenges this year to help raise money, and one or two that I have done before!

2009

1st Jan – Edinburgh Triathlon

25th April – Highland Fling (53 mile ultra marathon from Milngavie to Tyndrum on the West Highland Way)

31st May – Edinburgh Marathon

12th August – Devil of the Highlands (42 mile ultramarathon from Tyndrum to Fort William on the WHW)

There will also be an autumn marathon (not decided which one yet), possibly another triathlon and whatever else I can think up.  Ideas welcome – but please not anything that involves heights!  I have never done a triathlon or ultra marathon before so these are brand new things for me – and a bit scary!

I am going back to Malawi to my school and village this summer and would love to go to Tanzania and climb Mount Kiliminjaro afterwards as one of my challenges but I do not know if I will have enough cash to go (a new kitchen in January is going to eat into my travel savings!)

20 miles on the WHW, training for the Fling

My training for the triathlon has been patchy to say the least, some would say non-existent but I am still determined to do it as it is the first thing I am doing to raise money.  I have got into a bit of a habit of swimming first thing in the morning but have had no practice in a 50 metre pool.  Cycling training in winter has been really hard, as I am never home in daylight so it is only really weekends that I would have had the chance to practice and I was not very good at getting time for that.  The last few times I have tried to go out my chain has burst and got stuck  halfway out each tme so that involved some walking with the bike, phonecalls and some help on xmas eve  from a nice man on his bike stopping to help me.  And then the bit that should have been easiest could turn into a nightmare!  I have not run in 3 1/2 weeks as I had been having pain behind my right knee and have been to the sports pyhsio at Hampden who said it was a weakness in my right glute and hamstring, gave me exercises to build up the muscle and told me not to run!  I kept quiet about the triathlon.  So hopefully the pain will be gone when I run tomorrow!  I won’t even go into the traumas of what to wear at various points!  Not the best preparation all in all but hopefully it will be a laugh – and not too cold in Edinburgh!

I have set up a justgiving site, follow the links/RSS feed on the right hand side, and I would really appreciate any donations through the year, as I attempt to reach a total of £2000.  I have never tried to raise so much before, although I know there are many people who reguarly raise much more than that.  I am not very good at asking though!

Evaluations

The Thursday session of my blogging and wiki twilight went much better.  Most people came back again which I thought was admirable for a second twilight and considering the mess I thought I had made of the first one!  I explained what I thought I had done wrong the first night and gave them the chance to look through wikis and blogs before we went on to actually doing a wiki.  I also explained how I had blogged about it so using mine as a form of self-evaluation.  I also went through the various instructions in smaller bits and gave more time for trying them out. 

The evaluations and comments that I got at the end were good and this made me feel a lot better.  I am not sure they would have been good after just Monday but I changed my practice and this made a big difference for the second day.   I also enjoyed the second day a lot more as I knew I was doing it better.

I passed my first assignment for my first management and leadership in education module with nothing stated that needed attention.  I may post it at some point.  Even better though my sis-in-law passed both her crits for her first placement in the PGCE course, and passed them brilliantly with lots of effectives and not a thing to work on or any points on her action plan.  And that is with a 15 month old son!  I don’t know how she is doing it as the PGCE was hard enough with no-one depending on you!

Teaching blogging

I feel like I have something to self-evaluate on for the first time in a while.  On Monday I ran a blogging and wiki twilight and was not really happy with how it went.  First of all I thought I was doing this same course to different people on Monday and Thursday so was trying to squash everything in to 2 hours and only realised about 1/2 hour before we finished that they were coming back on Thursday!  So I did not need to rush! 

This would have meant that I could have spent a lot longer on letting them look through blogs and discussing what they might use one for before actually starting to set one up.  As it was I just went through mine, a primary one and a secondary one when I should then have given them time to see what other people use them for as I realised later that some people did not really know why/how they would use one which was not their fault.

Apart from that I probably did the best I could with the range of abilities there were in the group.  Each person got one set up and was able to add in a post with a picture.  I showed them all how to manage their posts and add tags.  I then showed those who wanted it how to add in some of the easier widgets etc so it was very like having a class and giving the ones who were able to do it more activities to do and going round giving extra help to those who needed it.  I found it difficult though and although glad to be getting the chance to change my practice on Thursday and do what I should have done on Monday I am also worried I made it too difficult for some people.