Baby steps

I guess I need to go back to the beginning (or close, anyway) to explain what I'm doing now and why. By the way, I wasn't sure what to use as a title for this - I wanted to write "the prologue" but it sounded too Frankie Howerd and "Captains log, stardate 04 07 2010" sounded too pretentious! Anyway........

I'd had a few ups and downs using the IWBs at Manor, but had pretty much stopped using them for a while at the point where my current journey begins. I suppose I was still sulking after a few bad comments from a student about feeling as though she was being treated like a 5 year old, having to come out to the board to move text around. Feeling a little miffed myself, after spending some time preparing that lesson, I went back to the old white boards for a while, but did feel that I was missing an opportunity by not using the IWBs. I was also being silly to let one bad experience put me off - after all, I'd been dead keen when the IWBs were first introduced. I'd been hiding behind the excuse "it takes too long to prepare material" for far too long.

So, a few months ago, I decided to have another go. Only this time, I would prepare some material well in advance, rather than just in time. I picked a topic I was not teaching at the time, "waves", and looked at the lesson activity toolkit for inspiration. I found I could prepare activities really quickly, in a few minutes, so I set myself a goal of preparing one activity every evening. This meant I could build a bank of activities in a short space of time as well as trying out a different type of activity every time.

By the time I was teaching "waves", I'd prepared crosswords, used "tiles", "anagrams", "wordbiz", "keyword match", "word guess", "category sort" among others. I used some in class, though not all - there are only so many times you REALLY can recap the same information in a short space of time! It had been fun preparing though and gave me confidence to move on as the students seemed to like the activities - provided that they could stay put and call out the answers. I didn't repeat my earlier mistake of asking students to come out to the board unless they really wanted to. I found that students like to be entertained, they enjoyed the competitive nature of some activities, particularly is they were used to break up a lesson. I tended to use one short activity at the start of a lesson as a recap of the previous lesson, one at the end as a recap of vocabulary used in this lesson and sometimes one or two in the middle, to test understanding before moving on.

I was also using the IWB to handwrite notes and sometimes had my scribble "recognised as text". This caused some amusement in class as the IWB tends to change the size of font randomly, so that one word might appear much smaller or larger than the rest. It became a standing joke in class, which at least kept everyone awake!

I saved most of those "lessons", intending to go back at a later date to tidy them up, make them look a little more professional, but felt that however lame they might be now, at least it was a start. I'd no idea how shocked I would be later, when I reviewed those awful scribbles and how that would provide the motivation to radically change the way I prepared my lessons.