It’s Friday. It’s almost half past four. I’ve had Year 9 pupils running through KS3 testing, 3 assemblies, 200+ students through my doors, various last minute headaches to solve, Y7 baseline assessments to analyse and ocrrelate against KS2 data and lots more besides.
And now I’m running the animation club. A club that started 3 years ago with lots of anticipation and enthusiasm. But now it’s Friday at the back end of September and the enthusiasm is a little lacking. I’m putting a brave face on, coming up with new ideas and encouragin the kids - but I’m knackered. In my head I’m home with a hot meal, a warm bath and something cool out of the fridge. Instead I’m sitting in my air-conditioned bastion of all things white (benches, Macs, keyboards, mice, ‘boards, paper - it’s like minimalist hell).
Maybe I would have been better picking a night where the occasional cancellation due to a meeting is inevitable - but at least I have more energy.
Ho hum, another lesson learned…
For the first time we’re running iMedia Level 2, and I’m currently in charge of putting 18 students through Unit 6 - Digital Video (with enormous help from the head of Drama and Media who is teaching me all sorts about framing, filming and timing).
Being me, I’ve set up a blog to showcase some of their work. And I think I’ll be adding to it pretty frequently as well.
I’m really impressed with the effort and enthusiasm they’ve shown. I was seriously concerned over the summer that the whole subject would be seen as an opportunity to mess around. I couldn’t have been more wrong and so I want to show what they’ve done to the world.
For this activity I gave them 2 hours, 5 pieces of music to choose from, a 60 second time limit and access to BBC Motion Gallery.
As always, please leave comments on their blog in the first instance - I’m sure they’ll get a kick out of it.
The full RL is http://egglescliffeblogs.org.uk/imedia
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before on here (I suspect not), but Yacapaca is great.
It’s an online assessment/quiz tool, totally free, run by Chalkface. You can import pupils quickly by simply copying and pasting lists from CSV, Word or Excel files and group them easily enough. You then set them a test or quiz (either from the huge list already available for many subject areas or a creation of your own), print a list of passwords and away they go.
A group of very clever people have devised a suite of KS3 questions aimed at assessing levels (from L2-L7) and you can get a class full of pupils to run through each test twice (with random questions so they won’t just get all the same questions again) inside an hour and then the really impressive bit begins.
You can track their results in real time and there is a wealth of analysis available. The screen I use most shows the % score for each test and a final level but you can also look at each pupils’ answer or analyse the answers for each question in order to look for common misconceptions or weaknesses.
It’s interesting to see pupils come from primary school with L4 or 5 and then score L2 or 3 and it’s certainly not a standalone solution (what is?) but it’s a useful way to baseline at pupils at the start of a KS. I’ve got a few more classes to run through and then I’m going to compare the data ot the English, Science and Maths baselines done by colleagues and I’m also hoping to compare (anonymous) data with some other schools - so if anyone else is using Yacapaca to baseline their Y7s then please let me know!
After 4 years of university and 2 years of teaching I finally caught a fleeting glimpse of that Work-Life Balance thing I’ve often heard people mention. I worked fairly hard for the first week, but then decided to leave it until the end of summer.
Halcyon days indeed, spur of the moment day trips with the family, whole 3s of days without using a computer - a truly momentus few weeks.
And now back to the grind stone. In by half 7, out by half 5, fixed the CSS on the site, restarted the Podcasting, restarted the animation, new courses, new Schemes of Work, new names to remember (colleagues and pupils).
It’s good to be back, but the break (the first real relaxation in years) was well overdue. Long live summers!
