Filofax as a teacher planner

Every year since the beginning of my teaching career I have had a teacher planner. I think I started with an A4 one in a folder, then downsized to an A5 spiral bound one. I love my A5 spiral bound, but I do find I end up with a lot of loose papers tucked in it, and then they fall out and I shove them back in the wrong place. It can get a bit messy.

I decided I waned to stay A5 size but actually be able to reorganise the planner and have those loose bits of paper secured. Introducing my new A5 pink apex filofax.

I bought it from the filofax website for £28 along with a portable A5 hole punch which was about £10.

Be warned, the portable hole punch was the biggest waste of £10. The following shows what it did to a single page...

Anyway, in the meantime at school we were asked what teacher planners we wanted for next year, so I asked for the A5 loose pages. Unfortunately these come ready punched with two holes, which are not in a great place for the filofax's 6 holes. (The two holes overlap with the 6 which looks a bit messy).

Speaking of hole punches, I have ordered a universal hole punch from Amazon which is being shipped from Japan. Hopefully it will arrive around the end of June.

Anyway back to the filofax. Mine came with a 2013 and 2014 calendar. I binned the '13 one and sold the '14 one on eBay, whilst ordering myself a 2014-15 academic year one. It also came with some coloured notes pages, 6 and 12 dividers.

I got the idea from my sister who is a filofax guru to make my own dividers. So I went to Hobbycraft and bought a pack of pretty pastel cardstock and got to work at making my own dividers. Half an hour later I ended up with these...

I am pretty happy with them, I just need to make some labels to go on the tabs. I will then cover the tabs in sticky back plastic to replicate the dividers the filofax actually comes with. I also had hole reinforcers, so have put them on the reverse of the dividers.

The six sections I plan to have at the moment are:

- calendar

- lesson plans

- classes

- monitoring (for my HOD role)

- meetings

- notes

Within classes, I may make a further 12 dividers (smaller tabs) so I have one for each class.

Finally I found a picture on Pinterest where someone had their name cut out on silver card and had a black sheet behind it to give a silhouette effect. I chatted to my sister about this and she offered to make me one. I think in the filofax world it's called a dashboard. I love it!

Once I really get into this, probably in September when I actually have something to put in it, I will write an updated post.

In the meantime, do you use your filofax as your teacher planner? Do you have any tips for me? Would love to read them in the comments below.

AS/A2 revision and collaboration

I had a really successful double with my year 13 Computing class on Thursday and wanted to share the plan with you. It is a small class of 7, and we have finished covering the course content so are now revising. 

To start, I had a list of topics on the board and asked the students to pick one (different) each. They then had an hour to create a Wordle of key words from their topic and prepare a 1 minute talk. They presented to the class with their Wordles displayed as inspiration for their talk. I also timed them and told them when their minute was up. 

The topic and Wordle really helped them to focus down to what they needed to cover. Also, getting them to present with the usual PowerPoint behind them meant that actually had to discuss their subject and not read off a set of slides.

What are your go-to revision activities?

Building theory whilst completing controlled assessments

Hands up if you spend a lot of lesson time (maybe too much?) focussing on controlled assessments?

 

Yes, me too.

 

It's so tempting to get in to a routine with these types of lessons where the students come in and just get on with their controlled assessments lesson after lesson.

 

However, as we all know if we teach courses that also have an exam; learning and revising the theory is equally important.

 

Welcome the "theory builder".

 

Myself and a couple of my colleagues came up with the idea of putting together a collection of theory questions and short activities that can be used as starters, plenaries, home works etc. I have just started work on this and I am currently taking past paper questions from Exampro to use.

 

This helps build the theory at the same time as getting through your controlled assessments.

 

 

Easing the marking load

Today I discovered marking statement banks; it has changed my life.

I actually heard the idea of statement banks for marking floating around my school a couple of weeks ago. But it filled me with memories of writing crappy, unpersonal school reports a few years back by picking statements from a bank. Also the word "bank" scared me initially as it made me think that I'd need to write a lot of statements.

But today, the pile of marking on my desk was growing to a level that made me anxious. It was lunchtime, I had about half an hour, how was I going to make a significant indent on the pile?

I flicked through a pile of year 9 home works and looked for common strengths and areas for improvement. On a PowerPoint slide I wrote three what went wells, and three even better ifs. I numbered the WWW 1-3 and the EBIs A-C. The reality is, that if I am marking work in the WWW and EBI way anyway, I find myself repeating my comments over and over. If you have a wide enough range of comments to fit the work, it will still be personal enough.

 

Then it took me about 10 minutes to go through the kids work and write "1B" or "3A" etc. on each piece. I still pointed out spelling errors and so on on their work, and wrote a couple of personalised comments where my statements didn't fit.

Now, next lesson I will put my ppt slide up for all to see and the students can write their relevant comments on their work for me. This also helps them take ownership of their progress by writing out what they did well and what they need to improve.

This is going to make marking so much quicker. Try it!

How to write learning objectives

Some teachers I know struggle with writing learning objectives. Having mentored numerous trainees in the past, it is surprising how many of them just don't get it and end up writing lists of tasks instead.

I remember being taught about learning objectives in my training and it made sense to me and it's never been something I have struggled with.

Somewhere along the line, I fell across Bloom's Rose:

In the centre of the "rose" there are the 6 different levels from Bloom's taxonomy. Then moving outwards, there are various key trigger words that you can use to construct your objectives at each level. Finally on the outer part, there are possible activities you can set your students in order to help meet the objective you have written.

If you have ever struggled with objectives, then I recommend the next time you are stuck, use Bloom's rose. It's a great tool for your toolkit.

Happy new year!

How committed are you?

Today I got told that I had a lack of commitment towards being a head of department because I said no to going away for a second unpaid working weekend away this academic year. I have already committed to one.

This led towards me being in a bad mood all day and just wondering how much more committed I could possibly be?

I have literally given up parts of my life and things that I enjoy because of my job. I used to go to the gym. Now I work so many extra hours and am too shattered to even consider it. I speak to my parents and siblings a lot less than I'd like to because I am normally too busy or if not, too tired to ring. Or I'm stressed about work so don't want to ring because I know they'll be able to tell I'm down. I don't get to spend quality time with my boyfriend most evenings on a work night as I'm working. I can't cook a decent dinner because I'm worried it will take too long. I have broken nights sleep because I'm stressed about work. It never ends.

I understand as head of department I have a lot of responsibility, I get paid more and I need to have a high level of commitment. However, where is the line?

Revision lessons

It's that time of year when the exams are upon us and we are all doing lots of revision sessions for students. There comes a point when you get to your revision lesson and wonder how you can deliver the material differently to make it less repetitive for the students.

The purpose of this post is for me to record a list of revision lesson/activity ideas that I have collected and used to share with you all. Also I find it quite handy to have a toolkit of the things that I have used so I don't forget them!

1. Multiple choice quiz using either Socrative or the Promethean Race Car Game

2. Mount past paper questions on bigger paper and allow students to work in groups to annotate the questions first - what sort of response is being looked for? What are the key points on that topic? Then structure their answer

3. Higher level thinking activity where students are given an image related to the topic and there are a set of four questions round the outside to delve in to what the topic is about, such as:

• What is it? 
• How does it work? 
• What does it do? 
• How do you use it?

Higher level thinking activity

4. Pass the question - give the students an exam question to answer and a mini whiteboard to pass around. They are all only allowed to contribute one word each time they get the whiteboard. Once they have written their word the whiteboard gets passed on to the next person to add a word to gradually build up the answer.

5. Write a song - give the students a print out of the lyrics of a popular song (don't let them chose a song - it takes forever!) and they have to rewrite the lyrics with a revision topic.

6. Padlet - Padlet.com is an amazing teaching tool. It basically enables you to set up a wall/electronic pinboard where you can put different resources eg. text, images, links etc and can be contributed to collaboratively. As a revision lesson tool, particularly for key stage 5, I get students to collaboratively contribute to a padlet by giving them topics that they need to produce revision for to upload on to the padlet.

Below is one I created for my GCSE ICT students where they can access all of the revision material in one place.

Padlet revision

7. Wordle presentations - how many times have you asked students to prepare and present to the class to then listen to 20 of them read out the slides they are displaying? The Wordle presentation forces them to present without reading off a slide.

First of all, give students a topic or section of the specification. Get them to pick out the key words and create a wordle. Then get them to prepare a 2/3 minute talk on the topic. When presenting to the class, they can only have the Wordle on display and in front of them for stimulus.

Wordle

8. Stop motion animation - students create a stop motion animation using mini whiteboards or similar on a given topic.

Stop motion animation

Keep an eye on this post as it is a working progress.

Thanks