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Tuesday 25 September 2012

Video by students for exchange trip fundraising

I'm so proud of my students preparing to go on thier exchange to Canada to perform drama pieces in a festival. They have raise half of their target funding and are pushing towards the rest. They have just released a brief video attached to their crowdfunding pitch.
Please have a visit and share this link with many others.
http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/investment/artistic-exchange-1083

Thanks
Mark

Sunday 23 September 2012

Rule of Thirds Power Point

Do your art students draw very small?
Do they draw directly in the centre of their page every time?
Want to know how to help them create interesting compositions?

I just wanted to share my latest resource called 'The Rule of Thirds'. It's designed as a power point with a printable drawing guide and a lesson plan ready for you to tailor with your specific classes names. http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Rule-of-Thirds-Power-Point-for-Drawing-and-Understanding-Composition

The idea is to get students starting to think about where they position their subjects when drawing. Using the Rule of Thirds to help break up the page and allow students to find the points of interest will enable them to structures their pictures in a more creative way. We all know that one success will lead to another and soon the students will be exploring more complex compositions.

Anyway, I hope this power point on the Rule of Thirds helps and I look forward to hearing how this has helped your teaching in your art classes.

Mark

Thursday 13 September 2012

Canada - UK Arts Exchange

Hello Everyone,

I'm quite excited to announce the culmination of the last three months of hard work and long meetings. Below is a fund raising website to raise funds for two students from my school to participate in an arts festival in Canada. Therefore it is an international exchange between schools from Canada and the UK.
http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/investment/artistic-exchange-1083

Please have a browse of the website to find

Saturday 1 September 2012

Making Phone Calls Home!

Howdy,

I am looking at tracking my phone calls home this year digitally. We all know how important it is to make phone calls home to parents about behaviour (both positive and negative, but I really can't stress how important those positive phone calls can be) and to log or keep track of them. New teachers may ask here why? me keep track of calls I make even if they are positive?
Yes for a number of reasons. It shows you have been making regular contact with parents and it could also save your butt one day ( I hope it never goes there). What I mean is:
  • What if a student or parent accuses you of not making a phone call home to let know about the progress of their child?
  • What if you need to recall a specific phone call to a parent?
  • How many times are you going to call a parent regarding a particular student in your lesson before taking the matter further?
  • How will you prove to your line manager that you have made very effort possible to provide for a student
These are just a few issues that I have had to deal with so far in my teaching career. Keeping records of phone calls home to students is something I started early on in my career and has helped me out a couple of times thus far. If you aren't recording your calls you might want to think about it.
I have included in this post a link (hopefully it works) to a simple but straight forward excel spreadsheet that I am going to be using this year to track my phone calls. There are prompts in it to help make it a bit easier imputing the information. Here is the link http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Call-Log
I will take you to my TpT website to where you can download it for free. Feel free to have a browse of some of my other teaching resources while you are there.

If you would like to make that excel spread a bit more user friendly here is a slight modification you can do. It adds drop down menus from two columns that should make imputing data a bit easier on you.
Step 1 - open document and click on sheet 2 in the bottom left corner
Step 2 - click on the first blank space under 'Reason' 
Step 3 - click on the 'Data' tab across the top of the page
Step 4 - click on 'Data Validation' and a little screen will pop up
Step 5 - in the drop down menu where it says 'Allow' select 'List'
Step 6 - click in the blank box labelled 'Source' (it should have just popped up)
Step 7 - click on sheet 1 tab in bottom left
Step 8 - click and drag under the heading 'Reason' to highlight the text. You should notice that the 'Source box has now been filled with your selection from the highlighted source. Click 'OK' and you are finished. Under your sheet 2 you should now have a drop down menu with selected options for you to select. This should make your phone calls go a bit quicker. You can also do the same for the heading 'Reaction'.

I hope you enjoy this product and it works well for you. Let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements or how it helps you.

Mark

Let me know how this works for you