Resources Review

Part 1: The Overview at Horticare

Resources Used in My Teaching

I decided to use and adapt a online resource provided by the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS). The RHS run the Campaign for School Gardening. This aims to encourage and support schools to develop and actively use a school garden. One of the main aims is enriching the school curriculum, teaching life skills and contributing to children's mental and physical health. This PDF contains the main scheme on which I will build my Scheme of Work and Lesson Plans. The RHS Gardening for Schools is designed to integrate well with the curriculum and that there is strong focus on Reading, Writing, Maths is particularly useful for the group I am teaching.

I am utilizing presentations and almost entirely produce the lessons that way, but they have to be printed and handed out because there are no technology resources at Horticare.

Much of the resources I used are sourced online, usually images that lend to the understanding of a topic. These are then embedded in to a Presentation which has to then be printed out for the students.

I do make use of games such as Scrabble, Dominoes, Jigsaws and such. That can be used in Numeracy and Literacy development. These are available at Horticare. I have outsourced some sowing modules for the students to practice sowing seed and then follow the progress week by week.

I utilize the printing facilities available at Kendal College, as well as the Library Computers.

The following image is an example of some laminated flash cards I used during the RHS Horticultue Skills course:

The 'Key Weeds' sheet was used with an outdoor collection activity during week 15. The log of that lesson can be found in the following TRL section. The selection of Fruit, Trees and Shrubs required word association and were also used in week 15.

Room for Improvement:
I was able to keep making improvement to my use of resources, based on reflection of each lesson, on feedback from students and with the help of peer assessment from my tutor Tam. Resources were limited at Horticare and it might be possible for Horticare as an establishment to seek to improve such provisions. But at a personal level, I'd say I'd like to see some ICT in use there. Certainly it could help with embedding the minimum core subjects.

Part 2: In Teaching IT at Kendal College

In teaching students about Linux and it's deployment in business, gives me opportunity to feature a much wider range of resources, especially IT based. I have a series of 4 lessons (mini course) with 2 different groups. My teaching will make use of slideshow presentations and live demonstrations. Students will be grouped for the 3 main teaching lessons (lesson 1 will be more of an introduction), and each group (3) will have access to old PC hardware/system for use during their mini course. Additionally I have prepared access to multiple CD's and DVD's to provide live Linux distributions for the students use. I have colour card assessment being used in Lesson 1 and a question sheet.

1. Colour assessment sheets
2. Wide spectrum Live Linux Media CD/DVD
3. Live Demonstrations (via the OHP)

The colour assessment sheets offer students a means of self assessment and at the same time it offers an indication to the tutor of each individuals level of understand and or confidence. The only things I don't like about this assessment method, is there seems to me to be the possibility of peer pressure affecting the choice of some students who don't want to appear 'unintelligent' to the their peer group, and as a result might pick a colour that reflect a greater understanding or confidence than is really true in their case. I have used it nevertheless, it's a method of self directed learning and should encourage active learning. Combining it with the question sheet in the same lesson should offer a summative assessment of the given lesson.

The Wide spectrum Live Linux Media offers students a range of Linux distributions that can be described for sake of the layman as: Easy, Medium, Hard. In that, this technology resource provides for entry level up to expert. The above image represents a small section of the overall collection and some media has been manually downloaded and written to CD's for student use too. It will allow for an inclusive learning environment and at the same time permit a development of ICT skills as well as related areas such as literacy, language and numeracy. There are some limitations of this resource in that it's response time can be slow when compared to the same media on a USB. However USB booting ready machines could not be confirmed and the cost of using USB's for each student had some cost issues.

Live Demonstrations, is a utilizing of the white board/OHP. It's not a slideshow, but a live feed directly from the demo machine to the OHP, used in conjunction with teaching discussion. Offering the student step by step walk thru instructions/directions to follow/practice. It's used equally to demonstrate what not to do on what is effectively a 'sandbox' machine. The teaching process is very adaptable to include the learning needs of all students. It's probably one of the most effective teaching methods I have used before when dealing with the subject of partitioning and system admin. It will be interesting to see how well it works in this setting at Kendal College.

Room for Improvement:
Through my reflective practice on the IT lessons I quickly established that for the sessions and teaching I was doing there were several improvements that could be made.
1. We needed to provide individual resources (1 PC per learner), which was only possible by dividing the group. Splitting the group was not ideal.

2. The classroom layout was also not conducive to the method of practice. In future I would seek to equip and layout a room specifically for they type of learning session being used.

Review Ways in Which Elements of the Minimum Core can be Demonstrated in Planning Inclusive Learning and Teaching

‘Embedded teaching and learning combines the development of literacy, language and numeracy with vocational and other skills. The skills acquired provide learners with the confidence and motivation necessary for them to succeed in qualifications, in life and at work’ (The National Research & Development Centre, 2004).
The above quote demonstrates how literacy, numeracy and IT skills can help support the learner as they progress to further study or the world of work. We looked at LLUK too. And during our sessions we learned of the importance of incorporating all aspects of the Minimum Core. We might for example use IT during teaching sessions, use an activity to have students do research, which involves reading and writing and even calculating. I did in fact use a good example of embedding numeracy during my IT teaching at Kendal College, where students used IT resources and had to calculate percentages when dividing HDD's for installations. Details of the IT lessons can be seen in my TRL and RJ. We discussed embedding the minimum core here.

During my teaching at Horticare there was ample opportunity to embed minimum core elements, though it was at a very basic level. For example in week 6 lesson we had word to cut out and associate with aspects of life, this involved a discussion of the meaning of words and images, recognition of words and spellings. In week 8 and 9 we actually did minimum core specials. The details are listed in the TRL.