Starting to get a little excited!

On Friday I went to meet my mentor, I was feeling anxious and nervous to say the least! Well I shouldn’t of been, she is the most delightful, sweetest teacher I could ask for 🙂 She has been teaching for about 8 years and has had several pre-service teachers before.  I have year one and there is around 4-5 students with behavioural and learning disabilities, so I will definitely need to keep my eyes and ears out!

I am going to go in on the last Wednesday of this term to do my pre make-up day, this will hopefully give me an idea of the dynamics of the classroom, the children and what they re focusing on right now. My mentor actually said that she has never heard of an ICT prac!! She never had to do one and hasn’t had a pre-service teacher do one with her before, not sure if thats a good thing or a bad thing for me yet!! They have a smartboard in their class which she does use alot but says she doesn’t use it as interactively as she’d like to! They also have 2 computers in the room but they are not often used, but is more than happy for me to integrate them somehow…..basically she told me there are so many other demands in learning and although she sees ICT as being an imporant aspect, she is inable to find the time to use them as much as she would like to. Hopefully by the end of my 3 weeks I can show her some ways around that!

She was very open to sharing any resources with me, and asked me about C2C?? I told her that I had read about it on a post ICT prac forum and that several students were surprised they didn’t know about it prior to prac. When she showed me it, it seems to work alot like Scootle. Another subject that was spoken bout on that thread were Bee Bots, these are an interactive little bee robot, that can be a wonderful resource in so many ways……great for instructional purposes, maths, the lists goes on. My mentor has one but hasn’t found th time to use it this year, she has allowed me to take hers home and have a play and work out some ways to incorporate it ino my lesson plans 🙂

Really looking forward to having a play with this and seeing what I can come up with!