RPI: Day 5 - Planning a Programme

A tad bit late with my Day 5 blog post and some of my homework unfortunately. The past few weeks have been challenging with sickness, reports, testing, observations and lots of time out of class (release days, meetings, tangi, teacher only days etc). Definitley not trying to make excuses but the reality is that the usual routines in my class have been non existent the past few weeks. 

I feel like the goals I had for myself at the end of our previous RPI day are still what I need to focus on as I simply havnt had the time in class to implement them.  These things were:

- Introducing some sort of 'hand it in' system to make keeping track of students progress more manageable. A long with this I need to adjust my timetable to fit in a conferencing timeslot.

- Refocussing on the 'Ground Rules for Talk' with all of my reading groups.

- Making an effort to explain the 'WHY' to my students - Why are we doing this? How is it going to help us in life? Why is is relevant ? etc

- Incorporating blogging into our contract - posting and commenting.

- Look into different types of digital modelling books to see if this is something that would work for me and my students.

I am finding all of the content of this course really valuable but there is alot to take in. I need to remind myself that it is better to implement a few things well rather than becoming overwhelmed and not doing things justice. I can always come back to the others things at a later date and introduce them gradually.

I have set up a 'Read Theory' account as I really liked what I seen....especially the simple no frills layout. I think this will really benefit my students and make them feel more prepared during testing. I plan to have a good look at this site over the holidays and explore how it works so we can start using it in term 3.

A long with the things I have mentioned above, I am simply going to focus on keeping things familiar for my students for the remainder of this term, until these tasks/procedures are ingrained and they can confidently complete them independently.