Last year I made resolutions for the new school year and reviewed them at the end of it. This year’s resolutions look a bit different; I received such an avalanche of quality, inspirational insetin July that I had a list in my notebook that went on for a whole page of things I’d like to do this year. I don’t anticipate doing everything on it, but here it is:

• Launching and maintaining Learning on the Loo
• Creating a “Secret Space” in my classroom
• A Facebook group for my GCSE class
• Learning how to do a Moodle discussion group
• Judging which is better out of the above two choices!
• Online mobile phone voting
• Green screening
• Photo progress board – “Mapping our learning”
• Less writing. Even less writing than last year: quality, not quantity
• QR Codes
• More group work
• Edtech digest, possibly
• Webcam visualiser for sourcework
• Westbury Granny Cloud. What a great idea, though perhaps beyond my reach.

I can’t believe I wrote this list in July, started this post in October, and am only just publishing it now. I feel like I blinked and missed the last three months at school: it has been a complete whirl, not helped by the Alpine Ski Course Leader course that consumed my half term break, and the revision guide I am currently writing for a publisher.

However, I have made some inroads. Learning on the Loo is now a firm fixture in all staff loos, and I have decided to try and make it edtech themed, in response to a questionnaire I did with staff this term, which kind of gets round the Edtech digest bit of the list too. I have photographed and captioned tableaux of my year 10s for each section of their course so far, and created a “Mapping Our Learning” board. I have experimented a lot with group work, and though I would in future question the wisdom of doing group work with year 9 classes in only your second lesson with them, it is getting easier and it really works.

I also have a diary room now. OK, so it’s my cupboard with the shelves removed*, a deck chair and a piece of velcro to stick the ipod on to, but it works, and the kids are super excited about it. I am assembling a bunch of hats and props for students who don’t like talking to the camera as themselves.

So, not bad for a blink-and-I-missed-it term. Hopefully I can continue with my inroads as the year progresses.

* My tutor group called this cupboard Narnia, so full of stuff was it. It took me several hours of gained time and any number of trips to the skip to get it empty.