The Day in the Life of a English Teacher in an Apple Distinguished School
Claire Barrett, English Teacher
When I came back into the world of classroom teaching having explored various other avenues for 15 years, I arrived at Bedford Girls’ School intrigued by how the Apple Distinguished School status would change the classroom.
Just six weeks in the classroom at BGS and I would now think very, very hard now about teaching elsewhere. I could not imagine stepping back into a school which without 1:1 devices, nor a school which didn’t have a superb IT Support Department or two dedicated curriculum IT staff who were as patient and committed as Mr Potter and Ms Davies.
It has revolutionised my teaching and the learning in my classroom. It has made me excited about classroom teaching in a way I have never been.
I would like to take the opportunity with this blog post to share three lessons from a ‘day in the life of the passionate teacher convert’ as the best explanation to support my enthusiasms.
Enter a typical Year 7 English lesson. The lesson aim was to introduce the new key topic for the term - the novel.
During the half term holidays, after a couple of hours one to one coaching with Mr Potter, I wrote my first iTunes U course. This was my first lesson using the new resource. We had a few teething problems, but soon we were all accessing the same course.
Using iTunes U means that the lesson is clearly outlined for all the students, including worksheets and links to videos and other instructions. Within this first lesson on the course any extension activities and support activities could be accessed to enable all the students in the mixed ability class to access the tasks at their level without any fuss or waiting around. Students were all able to work at their own pace and pair and group work, supported by more focused teacher involvement, dominated over more traditional whole class teaching.
During the lesson, I received an email from the form tutor informing me of a student absence and asking for the class work to be sent home. I quickly emailed directing the student to the iTunes U course, so that despite absence she could be working alongside us.
From Year 7, we move to a typical Year 9 English lesson, reviewing a Shakespeare assessment.
The students had previously shared some Shakespeare coursework with me via Google Drive. Ahead of the lesson, I had marked their work using Google Doc comment threads. We began the lesson by spending a short period reviewing and revising based on the feedback.
They then watched short sections of various film versions of the play with ClickView, a television and film repository, using their iPads and earphones. The girls made ‘Big Silent Pictures’ with their partners - they conversed using mini whiteboards and pens, sharing their opinions of the different versions of the scenes. Later the students used their iPads to photograph their homework written on the whiteboard.
We now return to Year 7, but another class, in their library lesson. In this lesson students worked on analysing book jackets of their half term independent reading book.
The girls began by using the iPad to photograph the front and back cover of their independent reading books. Using an exemplar shared with them, they annotated their covers, independently deciding whether to use Notability or Explain Everything. They then produced book jacket suitable for a re-launch using Book Creator or Pages. Examples of which can be seen below.
These were just three out of the five lessons of an Autumn day. The afternoon saw Year 13 use iTunes U to support their course, while I kept track of their progress with iDoceo, a versatile mark book app.
Even just sharing three lessons I hope it is clear to see how different teaching and learning has become. For me, to remove the support of iPad and technology and then try to teach the same lessons would have required very different approaches. The lessons may not have been so engaging or achieved the same progress within the hour, and my time and focus might have been on the delivery rather than spending important lesson time observing, assessing and supporting learning.
