Timetabling 450 relationships

November 18, 2006

Recently I counted up exactly how many kids I was responsible for teaching in my NQT year. Once I had doubled my year 9s because I swap groups each term, I came up with figure of 450 (which includes my tutor group) I think that this is too much.

It also equates to 18 classes + my tutor group. 18 markbooks, 18 seating plans, 18 sets of tracking & reports.

3 of my Y10 groups are shared with other teachers. If they weren’t shared that would mean 3 less classes for me.

Y11 2x1hr per week
Y10 1x3hrs 2×2 hrs 2x1hr
Y9 4×1 hr
Y8 2×1
Y7 1×1

[PS this never got posted last november its been sitting in drafts for months]

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Posted by richard

No Comment – Sorry Mr G

November 13, 2006

I heard that Mr G was complaining that comments were closed on my blog. That was not intentional. It was a previous anti spam method that kept them closed by default – then I have to manually open them. I just forget this time. I might change that value now as the spam filter seams to work well.

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Posted by richard

Fun with scissors and glue: Year 7 books

November 8, 2006

At St W’s KS3 children stuck their printed work into A4 books. When I first saw this I thought it was rubbish, but I came round, the linear order of a book coupled with the stickyness of glue makes it a good way of seeing what work is there and what is missing. In fact at this school I asked for books for my year 7′s.

They have been sitting at the front of the room waiting for me to give them out for a few weeks. I am going to bite the bullet tomorrow and have “fun” (hmm) with scissors and glue.

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Posted by richard

Going back to paper

November 6, 2006

I’m almost ready to go back to a bound teacher’s planner. I’ve been relying on an Excel based planner/scheduler. One of the reasons is that my memory stick doesn’t work in a few rooms so I loose access to Excel. The other is that I don’t evaluate as freely (the next teacher is coming in and rushing me off the machine).

I miss having a single book where I write everything down that needs to be rememebered. The excel planner doesn’t fullfill that need. What it is good at though is giving an overview of what was/willl be taught for each class. I’ll probably end up maintaining 2 systems for a bit (suck it and see) bummer.

I wrote about this before a the begining of term.

My school Planner has already fallen to bits, despite me hardly using it. Anyway with 3 days on one page its not enough paper for me.

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Posted by richard

Moodle for DIDA

November 6, 2006

I’m assessing our AIDA taught coursework for Y10 and I’m up to my eyes in plastic wallets of kid’s printed work and typing grades into Excel. Surely thats where Moodle can help us, get it submitted electronically, kind of a half way house towards them creating there own portfolio.

Marking on Moodle is a bit slow, but hey at this stage its enough to know that the work has been submitted or not. Also, the grade book and csv export is adequate but could do with refining. Hopefully there will be improvements in the next upgrade (we haven’t upgraded to 1.6 yet).

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Posted by richard

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