Trying to be "a hammer not a nail"

Since last week's TeachMeet everything has been very busy; lots of lectures and seminars, #tmbolton live stream, becoming a part of @theheadsoffice's 100WC, going into a local school to do stop motion animation with the children and generally meeting new people involved in ICT... so lots to discuss!

This time next week I should be in Exmouth! Hopefully I'll be settled down in my accommodation by now and looking forward to starting my first teaching placement the next morning. I'm obviously really excited about getting into school without just being an observer, being able to get involved in what the children are learning will be so interesting. Last Monday afternoon we had an ICT lecture at Plymouth University where the regional manager from Education City, @kierandwyer, came in to tell us all about Education City and go through in depth what all the features do. I found this useful as although we had used it in a seminar it would have been hard to have learnt so much ourselves. 

To be honest, I hadn't thought much about this tweet as it has been my natural instinct (embarrassingly) just to go along with things, trying not to inconvenience anyone. However my lecturer, @ethinking tweeted back.

This got me thinking (and yeah if you've noticed I've quoted that in my twitter bio so that I can continue!). From this, I emailed the teacher that I'll be working alongside on my placement, mentioning the activities that I could contribute to the three weeks that I'll be there and she sounded more than happy for me do so. For me this whole hammer thing is a little bit of a challenge, but something that I've found has benefited me within the BEd course and within my personal learning network already. This definitely motivated me to respond to @theheadsoffice's request for people to become involved with 100WC. A challenge created by Julia Skinner to get under 16's writing one hundred words, through a blog, about that week's topic. So far I've read quite a few posts by the children and they are so interesting to read! You get a wide range of ages and abilities which makes a great variety of posts, some done as a class and presented in a certain way, or others from individuals. All the ideas I have read so far have been very creative, and some have even taken me by surprise with their thoughts.

I'm so glad that I've felt a bit more pressure to influence and become a part of things as I would have completely missed out on these useful and really fun opportunities.

From going to my first TeachMeet (reference to my last blog on here), I gathered at the uni with lots of other BEd students to watch the live stream of #tmbolton on Friday night which was good (with pasties!). And hopefully we'll be doing the same for the TeachMeet in London on Thursday evening (this time with "wine and nibbles" apparently) so looking forward to that and all the other exciting things to come with my teaching placement.

@HannahSheltonTT