Retirement .. Relax .. Travel

Well, 2009 was not a very good year for me.  Out on worker’s compensation for over three months, afraid to be in certain parts of school, lack of sleep most school nights and finally working part time at school.  I am usually a very patient teacher in my classroom – just ask the other teachers at my school – but since time out this year, my patience wore thin a lot quicker.

Hopefully 2010 will be a lot better.  Back at work teaching the equivalent of four days over a five day period.  This will give me extra time to do the computer work I want to accomplish before I retire at the end of 2010.

I will be teaching my favourite subjects: literacy, numeracy, Computer IT and LOTE.  Will have all the grade 6/7 students for IT so they will each have a blog to work with after they have done an internet safety course. Will be starting a new blog for the school literacy program especially grades 6-8 who will be working with the Carole Christensen model.  Then another blog for LOTE with categories for the different languages we will be offering as introductions for our grade 6/7 students.

Hopefully the school intranet will get better use.  We need to do a lot more training of our teachers with using IT in the classroom, especially now we have purchased some netbooks with wireless connections. Perhaps those two afternoons a week, when I should be off, could be used helping teachers plan and assess work using the Education Department grade 6 and 10 checklists.

As you can tell, I am happy with what I will be doing next year. 

I would love suggestions for sites with great literacy(especially Australian) and LOTE resources – French, German, Thai, Indonesian, Japanese and Auslan. All the grade 6/7 students will be beginners in these languages.  Perhaps some podcasts would be ideal for them to download if they have an iPod.