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Safeguarding Children – EPS Lecture 9

By EPSNo Comments

This is a really important subject as according to statistics most safe guarding issues affect new teachers in their first 5 years of teaching. Its not a laughing matter and something that needs to be grasped as important as it affects the obvious child that needs to be protected but also I need to be protected also.

There are a small proportion of children that are being abused but safeguarding is not just about those actually being abused but actually all children so there is a distinction between safeguarding and child protection..

We are looking at the Stay safe of the every child matters agenda

Child abuse is from someone inflicting harm or failing to prevent that abuse on a child.

Child abuse…

  • Neglect
  • Physical abuse
  • Emotional abuse
  • Sexual abuse

Drivers of Change

This tends to be due to deaths after it is too late.

Key deaths have been

Victoria Climbie 2000

Lauren Wright  2000

Holly Wells and Jesica Chapman 2002

Peter Connolly 2007

Khyra Ishaq 2008

Lauren is a key case for us as teachers.

It sickens me to hear of all the horrible murders that have happened to date and i think that its terrible that people can do these sort of things to children. The question is would it have happened any way even if there was the best possible scheme in place to stop this from happening.

Some children are more likely to be abused more..

These include

Special needs

cultural issues

children who are privately fostered

children missing from education

Looked after children

Children in armed forces

Its not our responsibility to deal with and act on the issues of child protection but just to report and pass on concerns and worries that come to our protection.

Final thought

Nationally 10% of children live with abuse this means that 1 in 10 children in my school might be living with abuse.

Who are they?

Personally speaking I am not sure how much the current schemes and policies are being efective and in actual fact it is creating a culture or fear amongst teachers and parents.

02/11/2010

Bits and Bobs – SD Seminar Week 9

By PGCE, SD - ICT, SeminarsNo Comments

Today we are having a looking at a series of bits and bobs.

We are going to look at a series of gadgets that will help us in our teaching that are fun and practical. Things like web cams, and microphones, Control devices like the Bee-bot using,

Death by PowerPoint

We watched this video that was really funny

Automated response units are a a good way to get feed back from the kids in a voting fashion.

Block poster  is a great tool to make a large posters

http://www.blockposters.com/

Audacity is a great free audio capture program http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Posterous is a free online podcasting application

https://posterous.com/

have a listen to our pod cast that we have uploaded to posterous

http://trcwest.posterous.com

Cue prompter is a great website for doing a scrolling auto cue prompter and its free

http://www.cueprompter.com/

We have been given loads of great links from Andy my tutor.

For the audacity part we used a large condensor mic that has a usb port and we used that to record out sound. We then used audacity to record all the tracks.

We had to just plan out our script and let it role on the script prompter above.

Once we had all the tracks sorted we put them into one linear time line normalized the volume and used a few fun effects to change the pitch and speed of the voices.

Its was great fun today and really enjoyed working in a team and collaboratively.

02/11/2010

Behaviour Management – SD Seminar Week 9

By PGCE, SD - ICT, SeminarsNo Comments

Few points on classroom presence

Today we are going to look at some aspects of behaviour management.

We need to protect our voice as this is out most powerful tool to control aspects of the classroom. Pitch it at the right level and dont strain it from the throat.

We need to develop a real presence in the classroom this is done by having strong body language and conveying a almost dominance in the classroom that is not scary but commands respect of the pupils. This way they will feel more confident that they can trust you and believe what you are saying.

Tips from older PGCE students before block 1

  • Keep objectives simple and to the point.
  • Do not try to speak over noise when address the class.
  • Being alert to the whole class, take moments to look up and even walk around.
  • Don’t asses your lessons on how you feel they went but on how man of the learning objectives were achieved. I DONT AGREE WITH THIS AS WHAT IF YOU HAVE DONE REALLY WEL ON ONE AND ITS JUST TAKING THE PUPILS LONGER TO GRASP. ( It is important to get them to learn something and not to just be busy

Group Work

  1. Acknowledge the girl works in and then just say gena get yourself ready to learn and ill speak to you in 5 minutes. Don’t confront it to strongly. Cary on with the introductions. Then don’t invade space when talking to her..
  2. Diplomatic approach to speaking the TA say how you feel and then use specific example of when you felt undermined. You need to stick to your guns and be assertive saying that my authority is ultimate and that i need you to support me not undermine me
  3. Deal with the fight with your voice. Raise your voice in a strong way. know who you can call on and then if it is really escalating then you can get help.. separate the pupils immediately. calm the cheering and say its not goog to spur on.
  4. Dont stoop to their level… reprimand it but dont make a big deal of it. Dont cringe up and laugh about it too much as this will
  5. Give the pupil the opportunity to leave within a time frame and then give a clear ultimatum saying if you dot this is the punishment. Be clear and concise and black and white. Deal with the boys
  6. Have a starter activity that gets them on task and quiet and having something to do while you wait for all the other pupils.
  7. Give them an opportunity to own up and an amnesty to own up. maybe by email in with who it was and someone owning up. say its not acceptable and i will not tollerate this on my board.
  8. reprimand the Joke and maybe turn it on them selves and say that is not on.. maybe go up one to one and say the it was offensive. have a moral code that you expect in your classroom that is in line with the school policy.
  9. say maybe that well you will be an expert on it and you will be really good on it but state that this is what we will be doing in greater detail.

With-it-nes

Banter can cross the line really quickly and can become over familiar to quickly. Over a while you can develop it and build it up but you must have the respect of the class and the pupils.

Learn the lingo that you use and be aware that some words will have an effect on their imaginations.

Top tips

  1. Don’t take it personally
  2. Be consitent – follow it through
  3. Dont be threatening or push kids int a corner. Threats – how effective?
  4. Criticise the behaviour not the individual.
  5. Is “control” possible? can you ever really control a class and change behaviour? You can influence but you cant control
  6. Assertion NOT Agression
  7. Nip the lower level in the bud.

Experience will give you a world of good and will build all of this.

Useful sites

www.behaviour4learning.ac.uk

Chalenges in an ICT classroom and

  • Playing on games e.g. flash games.
  • listening to music on sites such as we7
  • playing with keyboards and mice –  fidgeting
  • Talking to other children and being distracted by their screens
  • walking around the classroom and checking up on each of them
  • leaning back on chairs
  • temperature of room
  • changing the keyboard keys around
  • saving work or not saving it correctly
  • forgetting to log off on another computer
  • always asking for help and being lazy to not listen

Responses to the chalenges

  • Chunk the lessons up to keep them on task each time.
  • Don’t talk for to long
  • Use a 5 minute timer to be in absolute silence

Better professional relationships will create a better learning environment and reduce the frequency of low level disruption.

Teach First Video

Get the pupils to take pride

Should be at least 5 praise points to one negative comment.

Patience, Persistence, Practice.

01/11/2010

Preparing for Block 1 Placement

By PGCENo Comments

Lots and lots of lesson plans

On wednesday this week i will be going into school constantly for the next 7 weeks. I have been planning out all of my lessons that i will be taking over the next few weeks and starting by doing a short term lesson plan over the 7 weeks and then the detailed lessons plans. At the moment it is taking me quite a while for me to plan each lesson as i am going into so much detail. I was told by my tutor to start of really specific and detailed so that is what i am doing…

I must admit it is not all that fun planning out lessons but it is really rewarding when you have finished each lesson plan and you feel like you know exactely what you are going to be teaching for that lesson.

I am finding that resourcing each lesson is quite time comsuming especially if you have to do powerpoint slides. But i have found that if you have the lesson planned in text then it is quite easy to j

ust paste across your points. Its just a matter of making it look good. I have used some free yet good looking templates that came on my mac.

Hopefully i am going to be able to get my plans for the next 2 weeks done before school starts then i will have a good framework to build on and i can then really start to be a bit more concise.

31/10/2010

Behaviour managment

By POT 1One Comment

Here at my home school they use quite an interesting behaviour management strategy.

Pupils are given a simple single warning if behaviour is disrupting the class from learning or disagreeing with the school rules. At this point the pupils has to give me their contact book and I have to write a time out warning In the book. Then if the pupils then re offends in a way that I deem to be to far I then have to fill in a time out slip and send the pupils to timeout.

For matters such as bullying, racial harassment and abuse to other pupils these have to be dealt with more swiftly and usually these are then quickly escalated to the one of the deputy heads who is head of pastoral.

The best way to deal with these incidents is to just have a simple black and white policy and make it clear what the expectations are but TO MAKE SURE YOU FOLLOW THROUGH WITH THE sanction once you give the warning.

One of the biggest issues is when trainees issue a sanction but don’t actually follow through on it.

31/10/2010

Child protection training

By PGCENo Comments

As part of my induction into my home school I was required to do a child protection course. This was a 2 hour session taken by the child protection officer. The point of this course was to make sure that the school had issued its statutory training in this area before actually allowing us to teach. We also needed to have this training in order to protect ourselves if there ever was an incident.

The main points where as follows:

  • Look out for any abnormal behaviour or signs that a pupil is being mistreated either at home or at school. These can be visual for example the face. It is important to realise some of these could just be due to children being clumsy
  • Do not offer confidentially say you have to pass on this information.
  • ALWAYS AND EVERYTIME YOU HEAR SOMETHING PASS ON THE INFORMATION THE CHILD PROTECTION OFFICER.
25/10/2010

It’s all go – PGCE Start

By PGCE4 Comments

This year I am doing a PGCE which is the training i need to become an official Teacher. It was inspired by my desire to want to work with young people and give something back to help them positively in these important years of their lives.

So far so good really. I have been on the course for about 5 weeks now and it has been pretty bussy and loads to learn but thankfully i have not felt too overwhelmed.

I have really enjoyed getting to know my fellow pgce students both on my course and with me at my home school and I feel that we are able to really help each other out with areas of subject knowledge and general support.

I have a great school that i have been placed in with really ICT good facilities. The have 7 great ICT suits and all the computers are current and up to date as far as hardware is concerned. (for child protection reasons i am going to keep it anonymous). The only aspect I am disappointed with is the lack of current and up to date software packages namely the Adobe CS suite.

So far I have been able to teach two lessons in school which was great fun. The first was a how to use Macromedia Fireworks lesson on photo editing and manipulation. This was for iMedia a new course that is, in my opinion, a brilliant course as its really current, relevant and up to date stuff that the pupils are learning. It has modules which focus on Digital Graphics, Web Authoring , Digital Animation…

All in all Im really happy and looking forward to getting stuck into some proper teaching after half term.

17/10/2010

Top image and photo websites including online editing

By MeOne Comment

Lots of people will know these websites but these seem to be some of the best  and most commonly used websites.

Google Image Search

I really like googles new filtering tab on the left as this makes it much easier to taylor your search. The colour filter is particularly clever.

Flickr

Flickr is by far one of the best if not the best image sharing website on the web today. Flickr has got millions of photos and the best thing is that some are creative commons share as you like meaning you dont have to have special permission to use them.  The search could be a bit better I think though.

Corbis images

This is one that i just found recently. I really love the user interface and the way that it makes it easy for you to view the images. It is a stock photo website just to let you know.

There are loads of other great sites and you can have a look at this post here that has even more links to cool photo search engine sites.

15 Best Image Search Engines to Find Photos Online

The last thing i want to leave you with is a cool online photo editing website that I found.

Picnic

This is a great site that is free and easy to use. You dont neet to even create an account it just works.  You can edit photos and make them look really cool and funky or just touch them up to improve the way they look

13/05/2010

Nairobi Light House Church Missions Conference 09

By Christianity, ConferenceNo Comments

Proclaiming reversal – Changing our World

Wow what can I say – it was a tremendous week in-fact a life-changing week. I can’t begin to tell you how fired up to do missions right at the moment. It is amazing how when the anointing of the Lord is upon preachers they can really motivate you to step out of your comfort zone.

It all kicked off on Wednesday and went right throughout to Sunday with a great “MiChombs” BBQ on the Saturday. Its so great to just be immersed in the word of God and praising him with thousands of others.

Without repeating myself too much I’d like to put in the Links to the NLC Site as they have done a great job at documenting each day of the conference.

PLEASE PLEASE do open one and read/listen to it  and even better all.

Its All about Others – MP3 DOWNLOAD HERE

Why? – MP3 DOWNLOAD HERE

The Journey of a Dreamer – MP3 DOWNLOAD HERE

Catch Something – MP3 DOWNLOAD HERE AND HERE

Stretch Forth Your Right Hand – MP3 DOWNLOAD HERE

We Care – We Share – We Dare – MP3 DOWNLOAD HERE

Here are a few points that really struck home with me.

The 3 points from Pastor Jack Hanes were powerfull

  1. We Care
  2. We Share
  3. We Dare

Those three words really spoke to me as they highlited the importance of caring an sharing with one another and also the importance of stepping out in faith.

Please have a look at my notes on the We Care We Share We Dare sermon with Reference to Acts 17: 1-8

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We Care – We Share – We Dare – MP3 DOWNLOAD HERE

General William booth sent a telegram. 1word

The master key to the greatest life on this plannet

OTHERS

We have to focus our life on others.

Pastor Jack Hanes

This tied in so well with the other sermon that was just entitled “Others”. This was such a challenge to me as I find that its so easy to talk about myself to others and not even ask how someone else is. I also was challenged to not be so self orientated when it came to social networking specifically the web side of my life. Its so easy to become almost Narcissistic with the way I update things that are just about me! I also feel to be more out going with things on Facebook; I know this is silly but just asking how someone is and how they are getting on either on their Wall or either by email can make all the difference. One of the videos we watched was really challenging all about our self consumed society. Pastor Jack said you could almost be guaranteed a best seller if you out self on the front of a book! It is a great challenge to society currently as really its so easy to focused on ones self you just have to look at the magazines and shows like Big Brother and you will see how its all about me. I challenge  you if you have read this today to ask every single person, who you encounter, how they are and what is happening in there life. Lets be more outward focused.

Jesus came for others. Sending his Son to die on the Cross for our sins.  Mark 10 –  even the God man came for others.

We must be walking in the same footsteps of Christ and be looking how we can give up our lives for others. Philipians 2.5 who can I die for today.

Here are my notes on the “Others” sermon.

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Its All about Others – MP3 DOWNLOAD HERE

There was a great challenge to sacrifice. By this it was referring to the 1 Kings 18  scripture – and how that the way that we received the fire of God was by sacrificing something. What is your Sacrifice?

Catch Something – MP3 DOWNLOAD HERE AND HERE

There were a few other sermons that I took notes on. One was the challenge of Dreaming an having a dream but also even more important how we can make some one else’s dream happen. This was by Paster Alfie.

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One of the things that was so amazing about this conference of how it is so important to recognise people and thank them and “love on them”. Pastor Tom Messer was so kind and gave some amazing words on stretching forth our right hand and stepping out. And how by this time tomorrow our lives will be changed – this is a real prophetic word as things must and will change in our lives – whether tomorrow – whether next week – whether next month but we must believe that things will change.

If you always do what you have do you will always be what you have done. Pastor Tom Messar

Stretch Forth Your Right Hand – MP3 DOWNLOAD HERE

All in all it was such a boost and truly life changing.

What Has Challenged you by reading this blog post?

Please do look at some of the Pictures bellow and CLICK on the picture to view the slideshow.

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11/08/2009
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