My Postgraduate Certificate in Education with the London Institute of Education (IOE) finally kicked off this week with a series of induction lectures and tutorial groups.  Lots of information, lots of housekeeping and lots of educational acronyms (FSM, QCA, DCFS, SEN etc. to name but a few) to get your head around, but more excitingly, lots of knowledgeable and inspiring professors, tutors and fellow students.

The Institute seems by all accounts a rich and diverse forum for learning, discussion and leading research.  The old saying “those who can do, those who can’t teach”, seems to be put firmly to rest given the qualifications and backgrounds of the other training teachers I have met.  With the credit crunch driving people to look for better job security in the public sector, PGCE courses are heavily over subscribed.  This has led to increased competition for places and consequently bumped up the qualification and quality of the intake.

Situated in Bloomsbury, the IOE finds itself  surrounded by iconic places like The British Museum, The British Library and The Wellcome Trust.  In all, a very inspiring place to be – steeped in history and tradition, yet looking to the future through learning, research, events, talks and discussions.  Indeed, this evening, with every intention of going to the library, I found myself in the audience of a conversation between the famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and The Times editor James Harding about Dawkin’s new book The Greatest Show on Earth.  I never imagined that ticket touts would loiter around outside such events, but I’m glad one did this evening.

Being part of the Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) cohort means we have been looking a lot at the decline in uptake of foreign languages at GCSE level, the introduction of compulsory MFL primary learning and reasons for learning languages more generally.  We also had a brief new language learning experience, for me it was a crash course in Russian (да, Зто дом!).  In time, I hope to write a more detailed post on the merits and reasons for learning a language(s).  These past days lectures and discussions have  given me a lot of food for thought on the issue so it may take time to digest.  However, I already find glib, commonly chorused statements such as “It is useful for future employment” being challenged and light being shed on language learning issues that I had never considered before.  As said though, another time, another post…

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One generic PGCE task we were set to work on was “What constitutes a good teacher?”.  Despite having taught for 2 years and having worked as a Classroom Assistant for another year, I realise I have never deliberately reflected upon this question.  The importance and benefits gained from conscious reflection are becoming more apparent and I look forward to linking some theory with things I might do automatically as a way of analysing and improving my teaching.

You can find some of my thoughts on what constitutes a good teacher as a PDF here: Public_Good_Teacher_09_IOE

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An excellent blogging platform

Welcome to Beyond the Pier. This is a wordpress.org blog  I have set up to gather resources and post thoughts on all things  related to language, education and technology.  I will shortly embark upon teacher training (known as a Postgraduate Certificate of Education or PGCE) in London and I hope to use this space as a way of documenting and sharing my experiences.

With it being a secondary level PGCE in French that I will study, the intention is to focus on how the recent leaps and bounds in technology and web 2.0 can be used to improve and supplement the teaching of languages.  However, I also hope to post more generally on technology in the classroom and how it can be used to facilitate and streamline a teacher’s day-to-day work.  There should also be a sprinkling of tidbits related to, among other things, language, media, cinema and music.

Language itself is sharing

I am a firm believer in the ideology of sharing ideas and resources for the greater and individual good, much like grounding principles of open source software.  With the emergence of web 2.0 and the plethora of social networking, publishing tools and online applications at our fingertips, it has never been easier to be a part of a specific, targeted communication and sharing, irrespective of boundaries.  (Click here for an excellent Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009)

As a result, teachers shouldn’t have to completely reinvent the wheel on a daily basis, especially in terms of tedious or mundane preparation/administration tasks that have been done countless times before.  By letting technology and the sharing of resources take over some of this burden, hopefully teachers should be free to use their time where it is better spent: improving and developing lessons, stimulating interest among students, analysing what works and what doesn’t in their lessons and developing/embracing new teaching techniques and technologies to name a few areas.  Think of it as something akin to Google’s “20 percent time” that allows their engineers a day a week “to work on what they’re really passionate about”.  Well, maybe 20% is wishful thinking…

To give a brief example, last year as a Maths teacher in an international school in Norway, I used Thatquiz.org to automatically generate simple exercises and test students online.  This saved me a LOT time, was better formatted, gave a more organised overview of how the students faired and saved a few trees in the process.  The site is completely free and epitomizes the usefulness of technology working well in education.  It is along these lines that this blog hopes to tread, albeit with a more linguistic slant.

On a finishing note, I am also writing the blog as a way of practising my rather rusty and neglected writing skills.  It’s a long, long time since I worked with English in this way and I must say I’m finding the process very useful for reflecting upon opinions and formulating and organising my ideas  – something that should prove useful for a teacher when you are asking the same things of your students!