Tag Archives: inset

The Lazy Teacher comes to my school

  November 5, 2012 - 19:56 |
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Jim Smith was booked into our school by a Senior Teacher, Natalie Shaw. Another colleague (@cgasiorek) enjoyed participating in one of Jim Smith’s lazy teaching sessions last year. I read his book The Lazy Teacher over the summer. Packed full of good tips to lighten your workflow by engaging your teaching mind. Jim brings lots of classroom tricks to the table, not all new whizz-bangers, but all focused on putting pupil energy at the centre of learning. The tricks are clever ways of awakening the minds in the room. Find the pedagogy – the methods – that suit a particular bunch of learners and use them. I do not have his slides to reference from the whistle-stop tour of his … Continue reading →

Creating Frog SOLO taxonomy rubrics

  August 24, 2012 - 12:13 |
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Frog training is here again! We have three sessions over the two opening INSET days and then fortnightly after-school directed time for the first half term. That is a total of nine hours training time. There are a few questions I need to answer and this post addresses some of my thinking so far – your input is very welcome, be it to tweak what’s here or to start again. Questions: How to differentiate the training for every teacher? How to collate evidence of achievement? How do we best use the resources at our disposal? 1. Differentiation My inclination is to use SOLO taxonomy as outlined here by Pam Hook and here on a handy MentorMob. Here are my first … Continue reading →

Frog INSET: Rollout to all teachers

  April 17, 2012 - 18:17 | ,
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This morning we ran a three hour INSET introducing all 82 teachers to Frog. Planning for this session may be read about here.  The video below shows the training materials developed to showcase Frog at the same time as providing learning guidance. The training was a success with many compliments and positive feedback from our excellent staff. Much praise goes to our lead learner Frog Champions (six in total) who led one classroom each. But it wasn’t perfect… Images of the resources used (click to enlarge, video at end of post shows more): Successful things to note: Videos were very well received; Video annotations with arrows and text were important; Sorting audio/headphones on all PCs was also important (all learners were … Continue reading →

Frog: the first INSET day for all teachers

  April 5, 2012 - 07:50 |
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Frog learning platform comes to Bennies I have to prepare for our first Frog INSET day for 80+ teachers – 17/4/12. I had an afternoon with our excellent Frog Champions to discuss the detail of the day. We got to here: Time Duration Activity 0900 10 Intro and overview 0910 80 Breakout rooms for compulsory activities book a room upload file and multiple files create workspace if finished consult lesson plan 1030 15 Coffee 1045 50 Breakout rooms for differentiated activities. Feedback forms 1135 25 Cloisters Where have we got to and where do we go from here? Frog Champions. 1200 30 Mass   You can see all the planning and prep work that needs to be done on this … Continue reading →