Hi everyone! Welcome to my first ever professional blog post. I'm a high school teacher from Melbourne Australia. My intention with this blog is to share with the community some of the activities that teachers get up to in their daily work life. To some people's surprise we don't just work from 9am - 3:30pm. :-)
Teaching is a lifestyle rather than a career, and is something that can really take over your life if you let it. There is always work to be done to help our students reach their full potential whether it is marking work, designing curriculum, researching new content or learning new skills to share. If you want a career that is ever changing then teaching may be for you, though it is often a thankless job. I am lucky enough to be able to stretch my skills in a hugely multicultural school where in the past I have been the only individual to need to wear sunscreen on excursions. I love the diversity of thoughts that come into my classroom. We are truly enriched by the increased experiences of our community. Multiculturalism can lead to difficulties in communication however as we struggle to reach and communicate to some members of our school community. This really plays on us as they are often the parents of the students who most need help. If we could find some way to effectively communicate we could hopefully make a difference in some of these students lives rather than perpetuate the cycle of unfinished education and disenchantment.
In this blog I am to share tid bits of useful information that I have found to help with my teaching, and the good stories and the bad stories that make up my day. Today for instance was a good day as I had connecting moments with two students, one of which I will share with you now. I have just taught my Year 8 math students how to blog in order to present their Olympic Mathematics project. Despite this generation being digital natives, they really don't have much knowledge apart from social media platforms such as SnapChat and online gaming. They needed step by step modelling about how to create a Blogger profile, create and share a blog address, construct a post and then publish it. I had the pleasure of teaching them something new rather than the other way around when it comes to technology. Yipee! Blogging is a fantastic way to give our students a global voice. My students were so excited to see that people from other countries were looking at their work! It really got them passionate about their work and made them take care in what they were doing. I was scared of using this technology before as it was something that I was unfamiliar with and I didn't want to stuff it up in teaching my class. A bit of YouTube tutorials and research however helps even a blogging first-timer like myself. One of my Maths strugglers is also a Pokemon-Go fanatic and I suggested to him the possibility of creating a personal blog to show his advice about that game. This morning he and another struggler came up to me with beaming faces. "Miss", they said, "We've made a blog together last night about online gaming and we've already had 10 views from France and America and we haven't even posted a thing yet!". It brings joy to my heart that these students have used a skill that I have introduced to them and are implementing it in their personal lives. This is a skill that is not just used in school. They have already planned out what is going in their first three posts. I have made sure that they have shared their link with me so that I can see their great work. :-)
Teaching is a lifestyle rather than a career, and is something that can really take over your life if you let it. There is always work to be done to help our students reach their full potential whether it is marking work, designing curriculum, researching new content or learning new skills to share. If you want a career that is ever changing then teaching may be for you, though it is often a thankless job. I am lucky enough to be able to stretch my skills in a hugely multicultural school where in the past I have been the only individual to need to wear sunscreen on excursions. I love the diversity of thoughts that come into my classroom. We are truly enriched by the increased experiences of our community. Multiculturalism can lead to difficulties in communication however as we struggle to reach and communicate to some members of our school community. This really plays on us as they are often the parents of the students who most need help. If we could find some way to effectively communicate we could hopefully make a difference in some of these students lives rather than perpetuate the cycle of unfinished education and disenchantment.
In this blog I am to share tid bits of useful information that I have found to help with my teaching, and the good stories and the bad stories that make up my day. Today for instance was a good day as I had connecting moments with two students, one of which I will share with you now. I have just taught my Year 8 math students how to blog in order to present their Olympic Mathematics project. Despite this generation being digital natives, they really don't have much knowledge apart from social media platforms such as SnapChat and online gaming. They needed step by step modelling about how to create a Blogger profile, create and share a blog address, construct a post and then publish it. I had the pleasure of teaching them something new rather than the other way around when it comes to technology. Yipee! Blogging is a fantastic way to give our students a global voice. My students were so excited to see that people from other countries were looking at their work! It really got them passionate about their work and made them take care in what they were doing. I was scared of using this technology before as it was something that I was unfamiliar with and I didn't want to stuff it up in teaching my class. A bit of YouTube tutorials and research however helps even a blogging first-timer like myself. One of my Maths strugglers is also a Pokemon-Go fanatic and I suggested to him the possibility of creating a personal blog to show his advice about that game. This morning he and another struggler came up to me with beaming faces. "Miss", they said, "We've made a blog together last night about online gaming and we've already had 10 views from France and America and we haven't even posted a thing yet!". It brings joy to my heart that these students have used a skill that I have introduced to them and are implementing it in their personal lives. This is a skill that is not just used in school. They have already planned out what is going in their first three posts. I have made sure that they have shared their link with me so that I can see their great work. :-)
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