Falling down and standing up again.

I've been working on something this evening, that I'm quite excited about. I want to try to make a difficult part of the "electricity" topic a little easier and more accessible for students, so I've been making an IWB lesson based around practicals starting with simple potential divider circuits, then leading towards much more complicated control circuits. I may try to modify what I have done today, at a later date, using the facility to link pages, that Barbara showed me a couple of weeks ago. However, I am getting way ahead of myself in the telling of my journey to this point. So returning to where I left off..........



After a while, I felt it was time to leave the comfort of the Interactive toolkit activities and to start preparing whole lessons on the IWB. At this point, I took a look at the material I had saved, to see if I could re-use any and to decide on a plan to make my lessons consistent with each other.

I also felt very guilty about one of our training days. I'd been asked to take the lead in a Science department session where we should plan an IWB lesson together, but I'd had to admit that I wasn't using the IWBs at that point and as no-one else in the department was doing so either, we spent the time on Study Smart instead. This worked well for us, but I couldn't help feeling that I had let Barbara and Ross down by not using the IWBs as intended in lessons, after they had worked so hard to bring them in and into the Physics lab in particular. I needed to buck my ideas up.

When I took a look at my existing material, I realised just how far I had to go to make anything at all worthwhile. Little wonder I'd had that complaint from a student much earlier. My material looked dreadful, terribly amateurish. I had different sizes of fonts, too many different colours of fonts and far too many "lessons" hadn't been changed from my handwriting into legible text.

It was a tortuous, intensely humbling but very necessary exercise to review all of my previous work. I had to learn where I had gone so badly wrong, admit my mistakes and above all, I had to think about what I really wanted to achieve before I could start to move forward. It sounds pretty obvious to me now, but making a good IWB lesson isn't about making something that looks pretty or "flash". I also had to think about what I needed to do to help my students to gain something useful from my efforts.

I could type the usual notes so that my awful handwriting wouldn't be an embarrassment any more (the IWB REALLY does make it obvious that I can't write in a straight line!) I already had some software I could use in lessons ("Absorb Physics" from a company called Crocodile clips), I had material in my Study Smart course that I could use and I knew how to show clips from You Tube and the like. This would help, but I needed a plan to help me to focus on the reasons behind each lesson.

I started to develop some really simple ideas that have worked well for me. I used the "theme" facility in the Smartboard software to make a coloured title banner across the top of every page. Each topic has a different colour for this banner. I adopted the font "comic sans" throughout as it is not too formal but is easy to read. Basically, it suits me and my style of teaching. Size 36 for the title, 28 for just about everything else. It is easy to set up a "theme" and save it so that it saves untold amounts of time that would otherwise be spent changing fonts and sizes of font for every new page.

I started saving my new lessons in a different folder for each topic too, otherwise the number of new lessons would make finding the right one quickly almost impossible.

To create a new lesson, I had to think about what I would normally do for each lesson, what I would say, what I would ask the students to do. I used a lot of the book I had written a few years ago, at this point. It helped me to create lessons quickly by copying and pasting text and pictures. I felt confident and happy that I was using new found skills alongside material that I knew worked. At last I was producing material that I could be proud of. It was probably just as well I didn't know how much further I still had to travel or the revelations that awaited me very soon, or I probably would have given up and used my time to watch more football or re-runs of Star Trek on TV instead!