Welcome to the beginning of my Reflective Journal.

Welcome to the beginning of my reflective journal for the Post Graduate Certificate in Applied Practice (Digital and Collaborative Learning) at The Mindlab by Unitech (2015)
These entries are a record of my learnings, notes,  and findings.  I will be reflecting on these and how this course has changed my teaching practice.

Confessions of a Teachers.  Sounds a bit naughty to me.  Not sure what I was thinking when I first started this blog way back in January 2009.

A lot has changed since then.

I have celebrated my 20th year in the teaching profession since then.  I joined a group of friends from those days teaching in Mangere and we celebrated with food, and conversation.
I remember those days teaching in Mangere with fondness and horror.

How could I let a child and parents threaten me and physically hit me?  Gosh how times have changed!  A court case would have ensued if it had happened in this time but back in those days it was restorative care.

I have been in a position of management, changed the platform from P.C to Apple in one school, ICT lead teacher, P.E specialist, Maori mentor, sports coordinator, classroom teacher, and reliever.

I have had the opportunity to present at various ULearns, South Cluster and Eastnet Cluster networking seminars.  I have throughly enjoyed my teaching career.

After 20 years though, I found that I needed something else....

I have been teaching at Elm Park School for quite some time  I started off as a reliever, and then was asked to open a new entrant class in Term 3.  Thus began my journey here.  I taught Y1 and 2, then moved to Y4, then on to Y5 and this year a job shared position in a Y6 class.

I have often thought about how I go about teaching my students.  If I sit down and really think about this, I can honestly say that over the years my approach to teaching students has changed.  I am sure my approach will continue to change as well.

With a colleague we were given an amazing opportunity to begin a MLE (with 25 students) using two different areas as our learning environment.  We were also lucky enough to be able to teach one week in class and one week as a P.E specialist and my colleague as a music specialist.  This gave me some flexibility with my personal time.  Because of this extra time I have decided to enrol in the Post Graduate Certificate in Applied Practice (Digital and Collaborative Learning) at The Mindlab by Unitech (2015).

I am looking forward to the year ahead and being able to reflect on my learnings.

References

Elm Park School. (2015). Retrieved September 23, 2015, from Elm Park School:
http://www.elmpark.school.nz/
The Mindlab by Unitec. (2015). Postgrad studies. Retrieved June 23, 2015, from The Mindlab by Unitec: http://themindlab.com/postgrad-studies/