Incoming transmission from the great giant head..

Stardate October 29
Last week before half term or reading week depending how motivated were feeling. This week we had the training day. This kicked off with a inspirational speech from the head inspiring us with fear and making us sweat about the things well I personally can’t control. I may have written about this before but the college is building a new campus and the existing main site is being demolished and sold off. Whilst the existing build is old and not especially pretty, it’s functional and large. The new build I fear is an operation of style over content, whist its corridors and lobby areas are light and filled with those trees they seem to populate all architectural models with, there appears to be considerably less space than we currently have. Secondly they don’t appear to be providing adequate car parking space. I know dear reader that in these ecologically troubled times where the ecosystem is on the verge of collapse I shouldn’t be wanting a car park, but be honest how did you get to work. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, if you build it and there’s nowhere to park they won’t come. After the meeting we all went off to our separate training sessions. I had decided to attend a session on the VLE Moodle. I was relieved to find it at a higher level than previous sessions; actually I was relieved to find it at all. The session was held in a room with in a room the outer room required a combination lock to be accessed and the inner room to be discovered, a notice on the outer door would have been helpful .The session getting back to the point was useful as it suggested practical uses for the VLE and then provided us with the instruction to implement them. As learning tool it’s really developing nicely and the statistical usage data it produces think will prove invaluable. If I only had an interactive white board in my room I could really use and exploit its possibilities. The idea or a forum relating to my sessions would be a great way to gain actual heat of the moment feedback on my sessions and the possibility to do session evaluations and end of term evaluations electronically would be marvellous. Removing a huge pile of paper , correlating the data and providing me information that would aid in the development and improvement of my teaching abilities.