Education, ICT and Technology
Today (and the previous two days) have been a first for me as a teacher, the equally revered and hated, snow day.
Longdendale Trail - CC licenced by thecrypt
Despite just having Christmas holidays, they went absolutely nowhere productivity-wise, so I’m taking advantage of the “free” time to catch up on the PGCE progress.
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So I’ve had the G1 for a good few months now and it’s pretty awesome except for the well-publicised battery issues. Now, I’ve recently started commuting which involves a fair period on the train and tube. Since I started, it seemed to be even worse battery life but I thought I was just imaging it; the battery didn’t seem to last until I got home however, this definitely seemed shorter.
It turns out that for whatever reason, the G1 really sucks when it doesn’t have a signal; it seems to rape the battery when it loses a signal while it frantically polls to find a reception. I installed Locale (a must-have app anyway) and an airplane mode plug-in for it and turned on airplane mode for the times I was travelling. The results are amazing, it literally lasts about twice as long.
Now, it goes without saying that this shouldn’t be necessary, the iPhone doesn’t need dirty hacks to last the day, but the battery issues were well publicised before I bought it. I hope this helps someone with their battery woes.
If you (like me, and apparently scores of others) are having problem with o2 Broadband and it dropping connections, it’s down to its crappy DNS. I recommend changing the router’s DNS to something like OpenDNS or Google DNS (which the Howto uses) for the time being.
Below is a post that I posted to the VLE of the school I am currently at. I don’t make any revolutionary claims here, I would imagine that all of the tools have at least been discussed, if not used, in schools already; this was just what I thought might be useful for this school.
Don’t be afraid to wait for silence or attention. As a new teacher you might feel self-conscious about standing and not talking but it’s effective and the students won’t think it’s odd; most of their Teachers will do it.
This post is attempting the slightly infeasible task of a summary of about 10 weeks of life in the PGCE student.
Starting at the beginning, it’s a very different atmosphere to an undergraduate degree. I’m not sure whether its the perception, atmosphere or both, but its more focused and intense as you’d expect.
That said, it was a fairly gently introduction to postgraduate life. Its inevitable with anything new that it takes a week or two of admin-type stuff before you get into it.
That was fairly quickly replaced a sense of realisation when we were told that we would be in schools in mere weeks. Despite everyone signing up for the course to spend their whole lives in a school, there really is a feeling of, “what, now?!” about the swiftness of approach. The workload up until this point is fairly minimal, enjoy this!
Going into school is a strange experience, especially if like me, you haven’t much school experience prior to the course. I’m going to avoid going into too much detail as most of it escapes me and I will post more about it seperately. What I will say though, is that if you’re in a school that usually takes on student teachers, you’ll might be suprised by how ambivalent the students will be to your arrival. You might get the odd student asking but on the whole, it’s an order of logic less of an issue that it is for you.
I’m about 6 weeks into my placement now and things are finally “settled”. What I mean by that is, lesson plans aren’t taking longer than the length of the lesson and you spend the lesson itself worrying about the students rather than yourself. It’s a nice feeling to have that mental shift; it allows you to enjoy your experience all the more.
I had originally hoped to keep this really up to date with the goings-on of my PGCE for not only myself, but anyone else thinking of doing a PGCE to see what the year is actually like. One of the first things that happened on the course is we were advised to be really careful about our Internet presence as teachers; this seemed to be at odds with the site so I had to have a good think about whether it would be wise to continue.
After deliberating I’ve decided to re-continue posting, I have no intentions of posting anything relating to my particular University or School, and all I want(ed) to do is to let other students know what the PGCE is like. With that decided, I’m going to try and post a summary post from September-now which will be hideously brief and incomplete compared to the reality but never mind.
