Animation video: Saving the planet

At our school we have a number of students who are very committed to looking after the environment. We regularly get an email about what we can do to help. From english@kkc, an blog for English students at Katikati College, I found this little animation, using the song Money makes the world go around and created by WWF Brazil, a message about saving the planet. This blog has a lot of interesting ideas for teaching, especially in the area of English.

Teaching, learning and sharing the load

Compartment (Flickr CClicence by Fudj)http://www.flickr.com/photos/fudj/121722150/

 I was reading Jenny Luca’s post entitled No idea: a post to read. I then read about a post by a young teacher, Todd Seal, about how  he is feeling in the classroom. Most of the comments also reflected that same feeling I got from the post. The “feel” was of a sense of loneliness or “aloneness” in the classroom by the teachers or, more specifically, secondary school teachers. I have been working in schools for many years now and have tried to overcome this sense that teaching, by necessity, has to be done in isolation.

Why do so many teachers work alone? Is it through choice or design? I would suggest that it is a combination of both. The training of new teachers seems to have remained basically the same since the early nineteen hundreds, if not longer. Sure the tools have changed but it seem that trainee teachers still come out with the view of teaching an classrooms. That their place of work is a closed space, often the arrangement of the furniture dictating that students work with the teacher at the front.