Festive thinking

WOW! What a year I have had. It is almost too hard to look back at the year in short because it has been so massive. I have immensely enjoyed the last year and have found it stimulating and challenging. At times I have really struggled with the adjustment to teach adults but I must say I love it. This was the last week for the term and now there are no more classes until next year :(

I have already been spending time thinking about how I am going to change things for next year to improve what I have been doing. I am hoping to try to encourage the students to blog. Not sure how that will go. I really need to be more creative with them using technology and the gadgets they bring. Hopefully we will get some more laptops for the class to use.

This year I have discovered more about myself as a learner and this has helped me understand my learners in new and different ways. I hope to consider more the various learning styles and personality types so as to engage my students with rich and challenging texts that can be presented in a way that can meet their learning needs.

I have found twitter and social media enormously helpful this year and find that the community of sharing amongst teachers has massively taken off into new realms for me this year. I have thoroughly enjoyed #ozengchat and more recently #histedchat as the conversation has been wonderful and encouraging. 

I am no closer to finding a work/ life balance than I was at the start of the year. I think new business and new job perhaps was a  bit much on top of my stay and home mum duties as well. Had a few melt downs when everything all got a little too much. However I have made it and am enormously proud of my students,many of whom achieved excellent results.

I am really looking forward to the festive season and am looking forward to thinking time. 

I have  as I get older than I can't think on the fly all the time and I do need to take some time to reflect and think some things through. 

I am building a Moodle site for our section this week and am looking forward to learning the back end of this software more thoroughly.

Until next week,
K