nikki able

This week my job description was tweaked slightly to incorporate gifted and talented provision and transition.  Both of these areas excite and intimidate me in equal measure.  I have started the way I always start - by trying to read everything I can find.  As I have been researching, I am starting to think that I need to stop addressing each part of my job as a separate task and start trying to understand where they link and overlap.  I am also realising that I am responsible for areas that as a teacher I have fully developed effectively in my own teaching and that I will need to draw on the strengths of other staff to ensure that the ideas and inputs I implement are beneficial to the pupils.  More reading to do but definitely feeling excited about my new projects!!  

I have wanted to use Google Docs for a while now but kept stumbling over how to do it.  I think sometimes you can over-think something, rather than trying to get it right, there is a case for just doing it.  It has been nearly a year since I attended the Google Academy and up to now I had only used Google docs in training teachers. This week I found two rather excellent uses for it.  The first was an AfL task.  I had delivered an input on Virtue Ethics for my year 13 class and needed to be sure that they had all grasped the key points so created series of questions using Google forms.  It took me only as long as it takes to think of the questions but gave me an overall picture of everyone's understanding and also allowed me to identify where the work wasn't been done so I could issue a friendly reminder to those students lacking motivation.  It was by far the most useful piece of assessment work I have done with my students in a while.  The second task was a collaborative pre