A little bit tired...

Back again already after a bit of a mixed day. Day two of the BYTES program did not run as smoothly as Day One. To begin with, we discovered that the subject with 40 students in it has only one staff member timetabled on to teach it - bit of a problem. The AP that needs to deal with said problem is, in fact, on year 12 camp and so I was unable to even talk to him about it. I will file that away for discussion and resolution at a later date. I am also a little bit disappointed with how our next BYTE, What's My Scene started off. The activities that we had designed to begin with started off a little slowly and many of the students became a bit bored. Luckily the afternoon session was a bit more lively and I think they enjoyed it. Will check their blogs later. On that note we suffered from a technical difficulty too. My beloved blogspot.com was undergoing a scheduled outage at the precise time that we were trying to set up the blogs for this group so I was reduced to having the students write in a word document that they have saved in order to have them post it next time (my wasn't that a long sentence!). Dramas galore! It can't all be smooth sailing though. I have no doubt that once the students get into What's My Scene a little further they will actually love it - we just have to get past the content crap to get to the self directed project bit that they will love. At least through this blog I am recording what went wrong this time so that when the topic is repeated later on we can tweak it. That is what this whole year is really - a learning curve. For me, for the school and for the students who are our guinea pigs. This year is the trial run - next year the new centre will have been built and the program will run as it was intended in an even bigger and better format. For the moment we need to celebrate the successes and then reflect on the changes to be made at a later date.