Me manifesto

I've been inspired by the 30 Goals Challenge, which encourages teachers to accomplish small goals in the process of becoming even better teachers. The challenge has been going since 2010, and the goals I'm pursuing are dated from 2012 - hopefully there will be a new set for 2013!

The first challenge is to set a Me Manifesto which outlines what you believe about learning and the ideals you want to have in the classroom.

As part of my research into Me Manifestos I came across examples using Muzy (Their Future blog) , Pixton (janet's abruzzo edublog) and Glogster (Aspiring to Higher Tech). I've never used any of these programs before so set myself the additional challenge of creating my manifesto using each of these formats.

Me Manifesto

My four main focuses as a teacher are:
1. The students are the most important in the classroom. My job is to help them to learn. Their families are an integral part of the learning triangle (school, family, student) and their needs also have to be met.
2. Recognising that everybody is different and nurture this. Provide lessons which are differentiated to meet student needs and styles.
3. Share my passion for my subject and use this to empower students. They need to take control of their learning, both in and out of the classroom.
4. Continue to learn, always. My 2013 learning goals include developing a network of professional contacts through twitter, completing the 30 goal challenge, and continuing to develop my reflections through this blog. It's not about people reading it; it's about me being more active in my learning to be an excellent teacher.


So, here are the Me Manifesto results:

Pixton


A fun and extremely user friendly comic generator. I loved how the character can be manipulated into different poses and can be personalised. Backgrounds can be moved around easily too. There are props but I didn't use them for this. I also like that this can be kept private.

Muzy


I like that language is animated. You can manipulate the colour and pattern of the background. I would like to be able to select which words to emphasise - although you probably can I just haven't figured it out yet. The privacy settings are extremely limited but you can remain pretty anonymous. I will probably use this as a way of presenting text to my students in a more interesting way.


Glogster



My least satisfying in that it was much more time consuming and some of the tools aren't as flexible as I would like (eg being able to invert graphics, not just rotate them). Of course, it will become much easier with time and practice. I did like that you can include video and audio on the poster, so of course I did. There are some cutesy animations, too. I didn't really like the templates so started from scratch; now I have a better idea how to do it I could adapt the templates quite easily. I used the poster format. The biggest problem was that the page was too big for my screen so it was difficult to get a good feel for overall poster.

Yeah, not happy with that glog. I can imagine that I'll keep going back and tweaking it.

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