Hi everyone. If you know me, then you know that I'm trying to be involved as much as possible in whatever my time allows me to be. As such, I am beginning to lose track of events, as they're all starting to blend together. To remedy this situation, and with the bonus of sharing with everyone the benefits of my work, I've decided to set up a blog to talk about anything outside of the minimum requirements of the course that I've found to be useful.
Firstly, for anyone that doesn't know me, I'm JC. I am (at the time of writing) at the end of my third year of a BEd (Hons) Primary Mathematics course at the University of Plymouth. Towards the end of my third year placement, I had an epiphany that changed the course of my professional development from there on in.
I was up at a very late hour planning a maths lesson for the next day, including an impressive (in my humble opinion!) mental/oral starter activity. Then something struck me. Here I was, creating these resources for my Year 6 class, when my next placement will be in KS1. Instead of letting these resources go to waste, why don't I give them to the rest of the maths specialists in the hopes that they are used again. Whilst I'm doing that, why don't they also share what they have with everyone else?
The seminar was a great success, so much so that it dawned on me to set this up across the other specialisms. This was quickly spiralling into something massive. I recruited other specialists to collate and share their resources with each other. However, it took another step forward when I realised that we were sharing our successes with other people in our specialism only - surely other specialisms would benefit from our resources in the same way that we night benefit from seeing resources from those specialisms that we feel less confident in? But where would we share these resources with each other, with everyone?
Step forward, http://studentteacherresource.co.uk.
What started as 14 students sharing maths resources has developed and developed into a project that aims to have over 20,000 student teachers around the UK sharing not only their resources, but their collective knowledge, supporting each other through teaching practice, suggesting reading for essays, interview questions... basically ANYTHING that a student teacher would find useful in helping them with their professional development beyond what their course already offers.
Through the course of the development of the site, the number of opportunities that I have seen and taken has grown and grown, and for anyone reading this that sits back and simply does what the course is asking of you, I say do more. Do more and more and more, and you will find that the number of things that fall into place for you will be staggering.
My aim with this blog is not just to record my extra curricular activities for my own purposes, but to inspire more student teachers to do whatever it takes to be the best teacher they can be.
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