QTS Q26a – Timothy West

Evaluation of the Apprentice Year 8 Unit

By adminPGCE, POT 3, Reflection, Teaching124 Comments

Evaluation of Year 8 Apprentice Unit

Over the last 5 weeks I have been teaching Year 8 a new module that I have created a medium term plan for. This unit has been called the Apprentice unit. The main concept for the project is to come up with a product that they can sell to pupils at their school. The product needs to be small and affordable with the average pocket money that pupils have per week.

To start with I asked the pupils to think about what sort of people they are targeting and what sort of products they might like. I gave them some clues to get them started with the product one of which was a usb lipstick product that could sell to females.

Above is an example of how I designed a simple poduct in firework and then asked them to create a similar sketch for their product. This particular idea really gave them the chance to be creative with their product. It was important that they undertook this task so that they could have an idea of what the product would consist of for the production phase. This lesson worked particularly well with some fantastic produces being produced.

They also had to think about how they would brand their product and come up with a logo. This was a good chance again to use the program fireworks to design it. It was important to give them a few examples of different logos and take them through the program in steps otherwise the pupils forgot it by the time they had a go.

Finally the pupils had to go through and sort out the finances of the product to figure out how much money they intend to make. This needed to be done with an element of competition.

At the end of this unit the pupils will be assessed via a presentation and they will have to present their PowerPoint that they have collated their research in and pitch it as if they where in a boardroom.

All in all this was a great project that is suited for an end of year project to consolidate a series of skills .

Please see this folder for all the resources files and folders. http://bit.ly/ivXjSw

21/05/2011

Marking pupils work GCSE OCR Nationals

By adminPGCE, POT 312 Comments

I have been marking some OCR nationals GCSE coursework over the last 2 days, which has been a great chance to learn more about the course and the way that it is delivered.

The school use a really great method for monitoring the work and recoding it through access program call JAS. The Head of IT has developed a series of queries that put the work into a database that can be viewed in excel.

The process for the pupils is to submit their work to the Joint Assessment System

Then me as a teacher can print out all the levels and then goes into each pupil and clicks on the work that needs to be assessed. Once I have given it the correct grade that I feel it deserves I then put a grade and a comment for any improvements that could be made to actually increase their grade before it is submitted.

The process is made simple once you get into a rhythm and once you master the nuances of the program. It takes a total of about 5 minutes per piece of work. The hardest part is when you have to make a judgment call on quality of the PowerPoint slides.

Once pupils then receive their work back then they can make the edits to it and view what each module needs to working on.

Above and below is an example of som work that I have marked with reference to the powerpoint that they where creating.

Below is an example of the tracking and monitoring that this program achieves and helps with.

Bellow is an example of the class that have been teaching and the results that they have achieved.

20/05/2011

Downloading and Gathering Information – OCR Nationals

By adminPGCE, Reflection, TeachingNo Comments

What we did & Learning objectives!

To continue finding and gathering information to store for your flyers.

To complete the 8 slides showing the screen shots of the information you have gathered.

To complete the copyright slide saying how copyright needs to be considered in a business context.

What went well?

This was a good lesson to catch up on work that was needed to be done. I thought my explanation of how to get the relevant screen shots was clear and concise and so that they knew exactly what to do. One of the boys had given up and I was able to try and motivate him to keep on going it take a deep breath and carry on.

I was really happy with being able to help pupils one to one.

I was also happy with being able to go through assessing pupils work by going around individually looking through their work.

What could have been done better and what will I do about it?

It was hard to manage each pupil across the class as they were a lower set ability. As I gave them a big chunk to do it was probably quite overwhelming for them to complete all 8 slides.

Now I tried to use the timer to give them 3 minutes for each of the slides and this was not that effective as many of them did not pay attention to this.

In the future I really could try and chunk this up even more and almost guide them through each one. The only problem is that they all had different band members.

One other area that could have gone better was my extension tasks. Now I had planned for this but I did not actually say what they should move onto verbally or on the screen.

So in the future I will verbally and visually put on the board the extension task for those that complete early so that I can allow for good differentiation.

Feelings

I felt that it was a good to ok lesson and on the whole they were on task working well.

It was tough to hold my ground to behaviour management as i had to issue a timeout warning and its hard as the kids become extremely distant when your issue some sort of sanctions.

Please use this link to view my full lesson plan >> http://bit.ly/fHnSoT

Learning objectives and homework Powerpoint >>> http://bit.ly/fxbOVJ

07/12/2010