A Week of CPD

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last week was the busiest ever for CPD. Some sessions went without a hitch, others were more troublesome! In fact, there were so many disasters at the start of the week that, by the time Thursday’s Go!Animate course came around, I was prepared for every eventuality!

The two pictures above give a flavour of the more successful Go!Animate session.

 The decision to bring along some of the Primary 5 pupils who had been trialling the success of using Go!Animate to improve literacy skills was made after reflecting on the success I experienced when I gave my first CPD course as a class teacher.

I had been asked to do this to introduce other class teachers to the idea of setting up a class blog. I posted my thoughts about the decision to bring along some of my own pupils to give their perspective on things and I’ve revisited those posts, one of which can be found here.

At the time, Maryam reflected in her own blog how weird it felt for her to experience a reversion of roles 🙂

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 “Yesterday Me,Anna,Sophie,Darcie,Rebecca and Ainsley had went to this place in Camelon to teach teachers who to use blogs.It was really fun! Though it was a little weird teaching teachers.But anyway it was still fun.

First we had went to the little café place.We had a scone,some biscuits and tea.The scones rocked!We got to put jam on them or butter.The tea was REALLY hot and my tongue went firey red.Aghhh!

Then we had went back upstairs and we waited for all the teachers to come.Then when they had all came we started our presantations.Anna and Sophie went first.Then me and Darcie but we had sort of made a muck up of it!Then after we had went around helping the teachers.

THAT WAS THE WEIRD BIT!

I’ve never helped a teacher and it was a bit emmbarrasing going up to them and saying, ”Do you need any help?”I had helped a few people but the computers there are a bit slow and they keep canceling things so it was a bit hard.Then after the teachers had went back and we got everything back in Mrs Vass’s Car.Mrs Brown had took some people and dropped them off at there homes.Mrs Vass took me,Anna,Rebecca and Darcie.It was really funny!

I can’t wait till next week if we are going back!”

One of the CPD sessions this week was also designed to introduce teachers to Blogging ….. but It did not go well! The internet was VERY slow during the session and everyone soon became discouraged. As well as that, I was torn in all directions, trying to help the 15 or so participants. How I regretted not having brought along some extra Primary School age experts to offer some professional advice 🙂

Other CPD courses during the week had various little glitches, and by the time it came to delivering the Go!Animate one, I had put plans in place to cover all unforseen events! If the internet was to go down, then I had made arrangements for offline viewing of the benefits of using the freely available resource. My invited guests ‘experts’ provided first hand evidence of how it impacted positively on their ability to use direct speech in their writing  (I can’t find the link they used now – typical!). The group who came along produced this animation.

I’m also indebted to Cassie for helping me to make sure that the CPD session went smoothly. She offered to introduce her Primary 5 class to Go!Animate and evaluate its effect.

 If it wasn’t for the fact that I knew that it actually did have a positive impact on children’s motivation to learn, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable ‘selling’ the idea to colleagues 🙂

Here’s a flavour of the successful CPD session!

 

2 thoughts on “A Week of CPD

  1. Great idea about getting the weans (sorry bairns in your bit of the world) to help with the CPD. As for technical glitches, these things happen and as you have gathered you soon learn to have backups. However, if it’s a choice between a techy expert and a practitioner, I am sure your colleagues would prefer to hear from you, glitches and all!

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