Links I mentioned: The Wellbeing-Driven Productivity Podcast Notes by Martine Martine's Website Martine on Twitter

Podcast Episode 27 Transcript Welcome to The Teaching Space podcast, coming to you from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Hello and welcome to Episode 27 of The Teaching Space Podcast. This show is all about books. I will be sharing five amazing books teachers will love. I recorded a similar episode right at the start of the podcast which was Episode 3. You'll find that here. Summer Break Before I start recommending books, however, I have a little bit of housekeeping to share with you. The Teachings Space is a term time only podcast and I am just about to start my summer break. So this will be the last episode until Friday the 7th of September, 2018. So there's going to be a bit of a break but do not fret. Over the summer break, I am going to be doing some very exciting research and prep for the next lot of episodes when we start the new academic year. I'm also going to be spending plenty of time in The Teaching Space Facebook group. I'm planning to do lots of live videos and also launch a couple of challenges. These will have a productivity theme and also be kind of focused on having a really good year come September. In addition to that, I will still be very much active on Twitter and Instagram, so please do give me a follow over there. Okay, that's your housekeeping, let's crack on with the episode. The Books I'm going to share five amazing books teachers will love. You will find links to each of these books on Amazon here in the show notes. Fair warning, there isn't a traditional teaching book on this list. Controversially, they are all about you. We spend our entire careers focused on our learners and rightly so, but we do have to remember to look after ourselves too. These books are about productivity, success, health and well-being. (1) How To Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind By Dana K. White Dana blogs at aslobcomesclean.com. I love the strapline to this blog, it's reality-based cleaning and organising. Through her self-described de-slobification process, she has learnt what it takes to bring a home out of disaster status, which habits make the biggest and most lasting impact and how to keep clutter under control. Now, why have I chosen this book? Well, teachers are the busiest people I know and it's very easy to let the home management aspect of life slide when you're super busy at work. I have used this book to help me keep my home under control so I thought it'd be a really good one to recommend to you. My top takeaway from this book was The Container concept and I mentioned this in Episode 26. The idea behind it is that everything has a container and your staff should fit into the designated container. If it does not, you need to get rid of stuff. One in, one out. She goes into a lot more detail in the book and also in her other book, Decluttering at the Speed of Life. So, both of these books, in fact, are highly recommended. (2) What The Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast By Laura Vanderkam. This is a powerful book about high productivity from best-selling author Laura Vanderkam. She blends stories of fascinating people with cutting-edge scientific research to show us how to maximise our valuable mornings, make the most out of our working hours and enjoy the results with deeply satisfying weekends. My top takeaway from this book was the fact that I waste my early mornings and I made some major changes to my morning routine off the back of this book. And also reading this got me to read Laura Vanderkam's other book, 168 Hours. (3) 168 Hours By Laura Vanderkam.  It's no coincidence then that recommendation number three of this list is 168 Hours by Laura Vanderkam. That magic number, 168 refers to the number of hours you have in the week. The book is all about where time really goes and how we can use it better. My top takeaway from this book was that I did a time study. This essentially means keeping track of every 15 minutes of your day and noting down what you're doing in each 15-minute block. And I learned so much from this process. It was off the back of the time study that I created a really good productive morning routine, which includes going to the gym and getting loads of stuff done. (4) The 5 Second Rule By Mel Robbins.  Let me tell you about the book. According to Robbins, it takes just five seconds to become more confident, break the habit of procrastination and self-doubt, beat fear and uncertainty, stop worrying and feel happier and share your ideas with courage. The 5 Second Rule is a simple one-size-fits-all solution to the problem we all face and that is that we hold ourselves back. My top takeaway from this book was interesting actually because I thought it was going to be just far too woo-woo for me. But Mel Robbins's narration on the audiobook is excellent. She just doesn't have that, how can I put this, woo-woo tone to her voice at all. She's very, very motivating and sounds like somebody you could really enjoy a drink with. I got the fundamental message from Mel Robbins that quick decisions are good in lots of different scenarios. Action is key and that's what I took away from The 5 Second Rule. (5) The Four Pillar Plan By Dr. Rangan Chatterjee. This book is about the fact that everyday health revolves around Dr. Chatterjee's four pillars. These pillars are relaxation, food, sleep and movement. By making small achievable changes in each of these key areas, you can create and maintain good health and avoid illness. My top takeaway from this book was balance. There are four pillars and you need to spend time on each of them. It's no good saying, I am just going to focus on food now or I'm just going to focus on exercise. That's not okay. The fact that there are four pillars means you have to spend time in each of the pillars. And so that was a really big takeaway for me. And this book is highly recommended, in particular the audiobook is excellent. They Are Books Focused on You! And there you have it, five amazing books that teachers will love that aren't about teaching at all. These books as I said at the start are focused on you. Your productivity, your success, your health and your well-being. I really hope you enjoyed hearing about those five books and that you might give one a try. Hop over to theteachingspace.com/27 to grab links to each of these books. Wrap Up And that brings me to the end of the show. As I said, I will be taking a break over summer and will be back at my microphone on Friday the 7th of September, 2018. Please come and join the Facebook group, which is called The Teaching Space Staff Roomso we can hang out over the summer. You can join in some challenges, you can participate in some live video chats. Let's have some fun on Facebook, it would be great to see you there. Also, don't forget we have 27 episodes for your listening pleasure. Do re-listen to the back catalogue if that's something you'd like to do. Also, hop over to theteachingspace.com/blog as I hopefully will be sharing some blog posts over the summer as well. Thank you so much for tuning in and I hope you'll join me for the next episode in September.

Episode 26 of The Teaching Space Podcast helps you prepare for a digital declutter to boost your productivity.  Podcast Episode 26 Transcript Welcome to The Teaching Space podcast, coming to you from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Hello, it's Martine here. Welcome to Episode 26 of The Teaching Space Podcast. In today's episode, I'm asking the question, do you need a digital declutter? I'm going to put myself out there and say I think you probably do. As such, in this episode, I plan to share some strategies to help you declutter and detox your digital space. Clutter Let's get thinking about clutter. On the face of it, digital clutter seems very different from physical clutter. There's a great example of this on a blog I like to follow called The Minimalists. If you go to theminimalists.com/digital, you'll find this example. Let me share an extract with you. Try to move 2,000 books to a new residence. Box up the physical books taking them off their shelves one by one, labelling each box with its appropriate label, self-help, literary fiction, Cambodian interpretive dance etc. Then, carry them to your vehicle, box by box, being careful not to drop them. Then, haul them to your new home. Carry them inside, carefully unpack each box and reshelve each individual book until every last book is sort of back where it was before you started this tedious exercise. Then, next time you move, grab your Kindle with all 2,000 titles instead, toss it in your bag and be on your way. Using this great example and rationale, the fact that digital clutter is hidden makes it less of a problem, right? Maybe not. If you spend hours a day on your computer struggling to find the files you need, then it's not really hidden, is it? If you always have your email program open and feel overwhelmed every time you see your inbox, this is actually a rather intrusive issue. An Infinite Amount of Space Don't get me wrong; I love having an almost infinite amount of space to store digital files. It's enabled me to pare down my book and music collection, keep a constant stream of photo and video memories and run a virtually paperless home office and classroom. I love that, but when it comes down to it, clutter is clutter. That's why I think the answer to the question, do you need a digital declutter, is a resounding yes. The Container Concept Let me just share a quick side note on physical clutter. That's not what this episode is about, but I think this might be of interest anyway. Lately, I've been working on reducing the physical clutter in my home. I use Dana K. White's Container Concept. I'm going to talk about her book in our next episode, so make sure you tune in to Episode 27. An example of this Container Concept is that I have one shelf available for cookbooks. That's the cookbook container, and I'm talking about physical cookbooks here. If I have more cookbooks than I can fit on the shelf, then the stuff, the cookbooks, have outgrown their container and that's not okay. It is not a case of buying a bigger shelf. What I need to do is pare down the cookbooks, so that what remains are the ones that I really like and there is space on the shelf. If I buy a new cookbook, I use the one in, one out rule. New one in, old one out. That is the Container Concept, and it is brilliant for physical clutter. Because, as I mentioned before, the spaces we have for digital clutter are so huge, you can't use the Container Concept. What I've got for you are a number of suggestions, six in total, to help you make a start at having a digital declutter. Here we go. 1. Practice Inbox Zero I've mentioned Inbox Zero on several podcast episodes now I'm sure. Rather than take you through the entire process, please hop over to the blog and have a look at the lengthy blog post I've written all about Inbox Zero. It isn't a myth. It is doable. Once you've spent a little bit of time setting yourself up for Inbox Zero, it doesn't take a lot of time to maintain it afterwards. Hop over to theteachingspace.com, and you could use the search function at the bottom of the website and look for Inbox Zero.   If you're willing to put a bit of time into setting Inbox Zero up, I guarantee it will improve your life dramatically. You will be less stressed, you will have less clutter and you will be more productive, so do check out that blog post. 2. File Storage I'm just thinking about places such as Google Drive or your desktop or your computer's hard drive or Dropbox or anywhere you save digital files. Make sure you have a really well thought out folder structure and all of your files, your singular documents, are in folders. If you have a structure where at the top level, you've got a few folders but lots and lots and lots of files, that's a little bit like having a physical filing cabinet and just throwing paper on the top of it. You need to file your digital files in folders in the same way that you would do that with physical paper and paper folders. My main online document storage area is Google Drive. I've got my folders set up in such a way that I know exactly what goes where. I have them named very clearly. I also use Emoji to give myself a visual cue as to what goes in each folder, and they're colour-coded. If you want to set your folders up in Google Drive so that they're colour-coded and have Emoji on them, then I have a video explaining how to do that on my YouTube channel. Be really, really structured with your folders and your files, and make sure you do your filing. 3. Rethink The Purpose of Your Desktop On Your Computer or Your Laptop It's not a dumping ground. Yes, I get that you can occasionally store things there because they're temporary. That is a quick and easy place to put them. You shouldn't have permanent files and folders there. That's not what it's for. Did you know you can have tools, like Hazel for Mac, to automate cleaning up your desktop? I also use Hazel, incidentally, to clear out my downloads folder on my Mac. I think it's every 24 hours or so, Hazel goes in and just deletes everything from there. Using automation tools like this can be super helpful for digital decluttering.  4. Photos How many photos do you have on your mobile device right now? Is it 500, 3,000, 10,000? Have a look. Then, have a think about how many of those pictures you'd actually put in a physical photo album if that was something that you did. I reckon it would be a very small percentage. This means there's a massive amount of digital clutter on your mobile device in the form of photos. I'd like you to rethink your camera roll. If you start treating it as a photo album, you can delete the images that you don't want. Say, you've taken a really nice landscape and it took about 30 attempts to get that final photo, that means you can delete 29 pictures. It's quick and easy to do that on your mobile. Treat your camera roll as a photo album, delete the pictures you don't need. 5. Social Media It's time to do a friend audit on Facebook. All of that input in your timeline is digital clutter. Look at Twitter, look at Instagram, there are mass unfollow apps you can use, many of which are free, to start reducing your social media clutter. 6. Let's Think About The Digital Clutter That is Email Newsletters Look at your inbox, how many have you got? Because you're going to be doing Inbox Zero, then hopefully you'll be able to start getting all of those email newsletters under control. While you're getting ready to do that, I highly recommend Unroll.Me, which you can find at unroll.me. It's a mass unsubscribe system. It does several things. It allows you to unsubscribe quickly, but it also will roll up the newsletters you want to read into one daily digest. If you don't fancy using this system, then another option is to set up a separate Gmail email account simply for subscribing to email newsletters. Then, you have a separate inbox so you can, for example, set yourself a diary note to check once a week in your newsletter inbox. That is a far better use of your time and will, ultimately, help you declutter all of those emails. Wrap Up Of course, there is one email newsletter that you won't want to roll up and you won't want to have to go in a separate inbox, and that, friends, is The Teaching Space fortnightly newsletter. Sign up at theteachingspace.com/VIP. Okay, folks, that's all from me today. I really hope you've enjoyed this episode. I hope you'll tune in next time.

Episode 25 of The Teaching Space Podcast explores how powerful a morning routine can be for teachers. Podcast Episode 25 Transcript  Welcome to The Teaching Space podcast, coming to you from Guernsey in the Channel Islands.  Hello. It's Martine here and welcome to Episode 25 of The Teaching Space Podcast. Today we're talking about the power of a morning routine for teachers. Now, I'm not talking about the morning routine that happens with your learners in your classroom. I'm talking about you. Today's episode is all about you. The routine that happens from the moment you wake up until you arrive in your classroom. Today's episode, I repeat, is all about you. Backstory I'll give you a bit of backstory. Up until fairly recently, my morning routine was nonexistent. There was nothing resembling a routine for me in the mornings. I'd get up at different times every day. Sometimes I'd have breakfast, sometimes not. Sometimes I'd go to work early and do emails; sometimes I'd arrive exactly on time and start my day in a completely different way. There was no consistency. For many people, this is absolutely fine. But I started to realise it wasn't okay. When I made the decision to start going to the gym regularly, I looked at my day and tried to work out when I could fit going to the gym in and I really couldn't work it out. I had a little bit of an inkling that the morning would be the best possible time for me but I wasn't sure, so I needed some help. What Inspired Me  It was at this point I read "168 Hours" by Laura Vanderkam. You absolutely have to read this book. The significance of the 168 number is that's how many hours you have in an entire week.  After reading this book, I did something called a time study. It's something that the author encourages you to do. So, for an entire week, I logged what I did every 15 minutes. I had a spreadsheet sectioned up into 15 minute chunks, and I logged everything I did. Then I analysed how I spent my time. The biggest thing for me was identifying how much time I was wasting in the morning. It was this exercise that made me realise I could fit in going to the gym in the morning and a routine would be the thing to really help me with that.  My Morning Routine I'd now like to tell you what my morning routine looks like and I should let you know, full disclosure here, I've been doing this for a few months now. I think a few months is probably long enough to establish a habit. I am definitely not the guru of morning routines. However, I have experienced many benefits from establishing this routine, and that's why I want to share it with you because I believe all teachers and trainers could benefit from having a morning routine. This is how my mine goes. Wake Up! I wake up at 6:00 a.m. Often I actually wake up five minutes or so before my alarm, and that's one of the things that made me realise that my routine is now sticking. As soon as I get up, I take my medication with a large glass of water because I want to be hydrated for going to the gym later. I have coffee. I will usually have a breakfast bar, something very quick and easy to eat that's going to give me a little bit of an energy boost for the gym. I steer clear of the high sugar breakfast bars. I go for something quite natural. Journal Time Then, I can't believe I'm going to say this; I'm really not this girl, I write in my journal. I use Day One app, and I've talked about this on the podcast before. (You can find a link to the previous podcast episode on journalling here.)  But I spend probably three minutes writing in my journal. I just have a couple of prompts. I set an intention or a goal for the day. I record how I'm feeling. I know it sounds really [woo-woo 00:04:35], but it's a really nice part of my routine. I do that. It takes no time at all because I use a tool called text expander, so I type in a little code and my prompts just come up automatically, so that's a top tip there. I write in my journal. Gym and Me Time Then I drive to the gym and I arrive at the gym just after 6:30 a.m. It opens at 6:30, so I'm there within 10 minutes of it opening. I do 30 minutes cardio and some stretching.  Now, this was a bit of a big thing for me to work out. Going to the gym doesn't mean you have to spend an hour there. In my head, I'd just come up with this thing that if you go to the gym, you've got to spend an hour there for it to be worthwhile. Well, I go to the gym every weekday, so 30 minutes is all right.  I should also add one of the reasons I only do 30 minutes is I have a bad back, I have a couple of slipped discs, so I have to be really careful with what I do. But 30 minutes of cardio every day and some stretching and probably some sit-ups and things like that and some back strengthening exercises, that's a heck of a lot more than I've been doing beforehand. I've been doing nothing beforehand, so 30 minutes is a big deal. If you can only go to the gym and do 20 minutes, that's totally fine as well. It's a really important thing to do for yourself.  The gym isn't for everyone. The point of this episode is not to bang on about the gym. It's about having a little bit of time for yourself and doing something that is a healthy practice. Remember, of course, going to the gym was one of the things that sparked me into working out a morning routine for myself.  Time For Work I get home by 7:30 at the latest. At that point, I have a shower, I get ready. Because I'm a wonderful wife to my husband, I tend to bring him a cup of fresh coffee. Then I travel to work and I'm at work by 8:30 at the latest. I officially start at 9:00. 8:30 gives me plenty of time to get ready for my day. That's my morning routine.  What Are The Benefits Of A Morning Routine? But I know what you want to find out. What are the benefits of having a morning routine? Why is having a morning routine such a powerful thing for teachers? I can really only speak for myself, but let me tell you a bit about the benefits I've experienced.  Time To Think Going to the gym every weekday, for me, has been a big deal. I have a back injury and I've noticed improvements in my pain levels through exercise. It's also wonderful me time. I have my headphones on, so I'm usually listening to a book or listening to a podcast or sometimes I'll go completely headphone-less, usually, to be fair, when the Bluetooth isn't connecting or they've run out of charge, but then it's just thinking time, and that is really important, too. I find the thinking time a bit more difficult, but I'm working on that. If, like me, you struggle with the motivation to exercise, get it done in the morning. It is more likely to get done. So, getting my exercise out of the way in the morning is definitely a benefit of having a morning routine. Increased Energy Levels I've also noticed, and this benefit kicked in very quickly, that I had way more energy throughout the day, and I didn't expect this. I know they say exercise releases endorphins and all that jazz, but I just didn't really believe it. But I definitely have more energy when I've exercised in the morning.  Consistent Sleeping Pattern I'm also observing a more consistent bedtime because I know I'm up at 6:00 a.m., so I'm always in bed before 10:00 a.m. 10:00 a.m.? That would be weird. 10:00 p.m. I'm sleeping better and I'm finding the journaling process, the fact that its part of my routine, is doing wonderful things for my mental health. I feel really good about noting something in my journal every day.  Better At My Job! Do you know what? The upshot of all of this? I think having a morning routine is making me better at my job. I think I'm really focused on achieving good things and it's making me a better teacher. Gosh, does that sound cheesy? Well, it's true. I really believe it. That's why I think having a morning routine can be a really powerful practice for teachers.  What About You? Tell me about you. What do your mornings look like? Are they what mine used to be or do you want to get a morning routine? Tell me. I'd love to hear from you. One of the best things you can do is join our Facebook group and we'll have a chat in there. So, hop over to Facebook and join The Teaching Space Staff Room. Wrap Up While I'm asking you to do things, because I'm cheeky, if you can find the time, I would love it if you left a positive review on iTunes for the podcast because it will make The Teaching Space podcast easier for teachers and trainers to find and listen to.  Thank you so much. I hope you've enjoyed this episode and I hope you'll tune in next time.

Podcast Episode 24 Transcript Welcome to The Teaching Space podcast, coming to you from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Hello, it's Martine here, and welcome to Episode 24 of The Teaching Space podcast. Today I'd like to talk about how I use Asana to manage my teaching workload. Asana and Trello Actually, I'm not just going to talk about my teaching workload. I use Asana to manage my entire life. I use it in combination with some other apps, but ultimately Asana is the hub of everything. So I've tried pretty much every task and project management tool out there. After lots of trial and error, I settled on Asana. But I must give an extra special runner-up style shout-out to Trello. Trello is a really good project management tool. I think Asana is a little bit more complex, but also a bit more powerful. So if you're looking for something slightly more simple then go with Trello, it's very visual and does similar things but in a different way. Asana - A Brief Overview In this episode I want to talk about a few of the principles I use to manage both my teaching and home workload, even though Asana is my tool of choice, these principles could be applied to any project management tool quite easily. But I will just tell you a bit about Asana in case you've wondered what it is and how it works. This is a very brief overview. You can find Asana at Asana.com;it is a web and app-based freemium project management. When I say freemium I mean there is a free version and you can pay to get additional features. Have to say, the free version is excellent. The paid version has some nice features, but they are the sort of features that might appeal to somebody with a large team of staff and a large business. So for a teacher or trainer, even if you are self-employed, the free version of Asana is likely to do the vast majority of things you need. For example, I work with a virtual assistant. and she's part of one of my Asana projects for the podcast, and I assign a task to her via Asana in that way.  Virtual and Physical Workspaces So you can, with the free version, work with a team if you want to. You can set up multiple workspaces with Asana. So I have a workspace set up for home and that covers everything from my meal planning to my business activities that I do when I'm not in my day job, my teaching job, and then I have a different workspace for my teaching job. For me, those two separate really nicely. They're about my physical location, so when I'm physically at home I'm doing things that are like meal planning and doing the podcast and that sort of thing, and then when I'm physically in my day job office, I use my other workspace. I hope that makes sense. I don't think I explained that particularly well. But my workspaces are essentially based on my physical location. You might find it works better for you to have just one workspace, and I can totally understand that, because if you have one workspace you can get a very big picture overview of what your commitments are. Asana's Organisation  Depending on how your Asana is set up, everything is separated into projects, tasks, and sub-tasks. If you have an email address that's your own domain, for example, I have @theteachingspace.com, so my email address is hello@theteachingspace.com. If you have that setup you can get an extra layer of organization, which is teams. So it goes: teams, projects, tasks, sub-tasks. You can't see this, but while recording the audio I'm doing some quite vigorous hand gestures just to really explain to you what I mean. Calendar Integration  As I mentioned just before, one of the great things about Asana is, you can work with colleagues, staff, whatever your setup is, and delegating tasks is nice and easy. Asana also integrates with your Google calendar. That integration isn't as good as I'd like it to be, but I do have a workaround, which I'll mention to you in a moment.  You can also view your tasks within Asana in a calendar view, which again, can be nice and helpful. For me, the best view on Asana is called My Tasks, and what that is is an overview of all your projects, and your tasks are pulled in to that particular view with due dates, and you can reorganize them in there. That's the thing that I am constantly looking at. So that's my very brief overview of Asana. I understand it's quite a visual thing. You can find the video at theteachingspace.com/24. My Seven Tips  These are my seven tips for managing your workload through Asana or an alternative project management tool. 1. Everything Goes In Asana If something's not in Asana, it doesn't exist, it does not happen. One of the main reasons people fail with project manage tools is they simply don't use them properly. If you don't put every task you have to do into your project management tool, things aren't going to work properly. A question I'm often asked, and it's related to this principle, is, "What do I do with events? Do I put events into my project management tool?" The answer is no, all of my events, meetings, appointments, that sort of thing, they go into my Google Calendar. If there is work to be done in preparation for those events, then I will create a project or a task, whatever's appropriate, in Asana, and I will tie in the due date to the date of my appointment. But my rule of thumb is, events go in Google Calendar, tasks go in Asana. 2. Always Have Asana Open To Update And Check Always have Asana or your web based project management platform open in your browser, constantly update and check it. In the same way that if you don't book your tasks into your project management tool, if you're not checking it regularly and ticking things off, it's not going to work. It should be the place that you go first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and you're constantly checking in throughout the day. 3. Use My Tasks To Organise Your Day Number three is an Asana specific one, use the My Tasks view to organize your day and to overview what you've got coming up in the near future and the distant future. This is an underutilized view in Asana by a lot of users. So if you already do use it, check out My Tasks and make sure you're using it in the most efficient way possible. 4. Create Workflows and Templates For Frequently Repeated Processes. This is going to work for any project management tool. I used to do this in Trello, I do this in Asana. I'm going to give you an example. When I create a podcast episode there are lots and lots of different steps, and some of those steps are done by me and some of them are done by my virtual assistant. So what I do is I create a long list broken up into subheadings of each task that needs to be done, and every time I'm dealing with a podcast episode, I copy and paste that process into a new task. This saves so much time. So be thinking about whether there are any processes that you repeat that could benefit from having a workflow or a template like this. 5. Facebook Groups Number five is a little bit controversial, but bear with me. There are lots of Facebook groups dedicated to specific project management tools and techniques. It's a great idea to join some of these in order to get tips and tricks on how to use your chosen tool as effectively as possible. 6. Say "No" More Often By having all of your tasks in your project management tool, you have a really good idea of what needs to be done today, over the next week, and in the future, and you should have a good idea of how long these things are going to take. Because they're all in one place, when someone asks you to do something and you can see you simply don't have time, it becomes a lot easier to say no. Practice with me now, come on, "No." It is a word I don't say often enough, but I'm working on that, I am learning. That is definitely a benefit of using a tool like Asana. 7.  Use Asana or Your Project Management Tool of Choice With Other Tools Trello is a great example, it integrates beautifully with other tools. Asana I'm currently using in conjunction with HourStack, which you'll find a hourstack.io. HourStack enables me to use the time blocking technique for managing my workload. I'm trialing it at the moment. It is a paid product, it's about $6 a month, something like that, but I'll make sure there's a link on the show notes, if you would like to check it out. So integrate your project management tool with other tools to make it even more powerful. Your Project Management Tools I'm really interested to hear from you if you use Asana or if you use a different project management tool, or if you don't use a project management tool but you really want to. I'm giving serious thought to putting a course together aimed at teachers and trainers probably about Asana, but I do have the experience of Trello as well, so that's an option too. But if it's something you might be interested in, then drop me a line, I'd love to hear from you. Probably the easiest place to chat to me is in our Facebook group, that's The Teaching Space Staff Room, it would be great to see you in there. Wrap Up Right, that's all from me today. I hope you've enjoyed the episode. Before I go, pretty please could I ask you to consider leaving a positive review on iTunes about the podcast? Because what that does is, it enables more teachers and trainers to find The Teaching Space podcast, and I would be forever grateful. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you'll join me next time.

Episode 23 of The Teaching Space Podcast explores seven ways that teachers can rethink their approach to meetings. Podcast Episode 23 Transcript Welcome to The Teaching Space Podcast, coming to you from Guernsey in the Channel Islands.  Hello, it's Martine here. Welcome to Episode 23 of The Teaching Space Podcast. It's wonderful to have you here with me. Today's episode is all about meetings. I'm going to share seven ways teachers can make a start at rethinking their approach to meetings, but why are we talking about meetings? What's the problem with meetings? Well, I'm going to be blunt. They suck up an inordinate amount of teacher's precious non-contact time, and that is simply not okay. What makes it worse is that many of the meetings we teachers attend don't actually need to be meetings. There is usually a more efficient way to handle the things discussed in the meeting. Meeting Strategies Now I appreciate you might not be responsible for setting your school's overall meeting strategy. By the way, that is a thing, a meeting strategy. Nevertheless, you can make a difference with the meetings that you organise. You can demonstrate best practice to your colleagues with meetings that you have to organise. You can also, if you're feeling brave, propose a meeting strategy to your senior leadership team. It is a thing. People have them. I think it would be really easy to go, "You know what, Martine? I don't have an impact on this sort of thing. I've got plenty of other stuff to handle," but you really can make a difference with this.  I'm going to try and convince you with the following seven suggestions. 1. Is The Meeting Necessary? Think very carefully about why you are calling a meeting. Is it necessary? Are you simply communicating information? If that is the case, do you need a face-to-face meeting? Perhaps email would be more appropriate? If you need to have a discussion and decisions need to be made, then perhaps a meeting is necessary, but ask the question why am I calling a meeting? If your reason for calling a meeting is that it's a regular weekly meeting, for example, that's not a good enough reason. There has to be a better reason than we have one every Monday. 2. Consider Who Needs to Attend Think carefully about who needs to be there. Does everybody on the list need to be there? What is their role in the meeting? What position do they take? Are they going to contribute something that will move the meeting along? How are you expecting the attendees to participate? 3. Time Allocation How much time do you need for this meeting? How much time are you going to allocate? What I find tends to happen is that if you are organizing your meeting using Outlook meeting requests, if you've got it set up so that your default meeting slot is an hour, you will schedule an hour-long meeting, but you might not need that hour. It might be okay to have a 20-minute meeting, but if you block out an hour, it will take an hour. According to Parkinson's law, activities expand to fill the time allotted to them. What's wrong with having a 22-minute meeting if you've calculated that that's the time you need? Schedule a 22-minute meeting. Remember Parkinson's law. With this in mind, why not use a timer? We all have a timer in our pocket. There's a timer on your mobile device. Use it. It will seem novel at first and some might find it a little intrusive, but you've all got limited time. Use a tool to help you stick to the time you've got allotted. Also, again with this in mind, start the meeting on time. The more you do this, the more punctual your meeting attendees will be. 4. Meeting Organisation Give consideration to how you organise the meeting. I mentioned Outlook meeting invites earlier in a slightly negative light, but actually it's a great tool and it's absolutely essential to ensure that everyone has the meeting on their calendar. They're a great thing. They just need to be used correctly. The other thing you could do if you use Outlook, and you can do all of this with Google Calendar and other tools as well, is you can share calendars with each other. When you are trying to set up a meeting, you can have a look to see who's available when. This is going to cut down on a lot of email traffic when you're organising your meeting. Make meeting organisation simple. 5. Using Technology For A More Efficient Process Can you use technology to make the whole meeting process more efficient? Here are a few examples. It might be that in the meeting somebody types up the minutes in real time. You could use a Google Doc and share it with all of the meeting attendees there and then so there's no need to email the minutes out afterwards. You've got no one sitting there with a notepad and then typing them up afterwards. Taking minutes in real time speeds things up really well. Another example of how you could use technology to make a meeting more efficient would be to use a Google Hangout rather than an in-person meeting. You still get that face-to-face interaction. You can still feed off each other's body language and that sort of thing, but what you do is you remove the time it takes to get to the meeting. If you are for example split across different campuses, different locations, then this can make things far more efficient. 6. Agenda I have three words for you, agenda, agenda, agenda. Never have a meeting without an agenda. It's like going into a teaching session without a session plan. Okay, maybe a bad example, but you take my point. You are going to waste time if you do not have a plan. If you don't have an agenda, you can't work out how long you need to allocate for the meeting. It is not possible to have an efficient meeting without an agenda. Spend more time here on the agenda to waste less time in the meeting. 7. The Format of The Meeting Finally, number seven, vary your approach to meetings. You might have a standup meeting. You might try a walking meeting. These are just two ways you can change things up a bit and hopefully make your meeting more efficient. Funny story. I used to watch The West Wing, and they had lots of walking meetings and they looked really efficient. I have tried them on multiple occasions. I will just say that if you have anything confidential to discuss, a walking meeting isn't always the best option. However, a walking meeting could be a great option if you're coming up with creative ideas for a new project or something like that. Wrap Up Those are my seven ways teachers can rethink meetings. What do you think? Have you experienced this frustration with meetings in your organisation? Does your organization do something different with meetings? How do you handle meetings? I would love to hear from you. The best way to start a conversation about meetings in education is to hop over to The Teaching Space Staff Room, which is our closed Facebook group. Just ask to join the group and I will approve you ASAP. Right. That's all from me today. I hope this has been handy, and I thank you for tuning in. I hope you'll join me next time. 

Episode 22 of The Teaching Space Podcast explores how Google Keep is your G Suite for Education secret weapon. Podcast Episode 22 Transcript Welcome to the Teaching Space Podcast coming to you from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Hello. It's Martine here and welcome to Episode 22 of the Teaching Space Podcast. Today's Episode is called is Your G Suite for Education Secret Weapon. And I should add that if your school or college isn't a G Suite for Education organisation you can still make use of this secret weapon as long as you have a Gmail email account. What is the Secret Weapon? So what is it? I know you're dying to ask. It's Google Keep. People talk all the time about Google Docs and Google Sheets and Google Classroom and rightly so. They are amazing tools. Nobody seems to be mentioning Google Keep and I just can't understand why. Google Keep is part of the Google apps suite you get with G Suite for Education and G Suite Basic and all other types of G Suite. It's web-based and available across different platforms with apps and actually there's a Chrome extension as well so Google Keep is very accessible and if you use Google Keep on one device it syncs to your other device. So it's a traditional Google app in that sense. What Does It Do? But what does it do? Google Keep is for note-taking. It is a brilliant way to take digital notes and these can be Post-It sized notes to long notes from meetings and things like that. You can also it to create checklists so to do lists or shopping lists, that sort of thing and you can check them off. You can create reminders in Google Keep which is a brilliant feature. These reminders can be based on time or even more amazingly location. You can utilise GPS so that reminder will go off when you reach a certain location. That's amazing. You can also create notes using images or drawings. If you just want to doodle a concept down and you're on your mobile device you can do that with a finger which is great. And you can take audio notes which again, on a mobile device is really useful. Organisation and Google Tools When you open Google Keep it can look a bit overwhelming 'cause you've just got notes everywhere. But it's easy to get organized. You can use labels or hashtags for organisation. You can also colour code which for me ticks a lot of boxes, I do like to colour code. Other nice features include the fact that you can copy the content from a Google Keep note directly to Google Docs. Obviously, because it's a Google tool it plays beautifully with any other apps in the Google suite of apps. You can open Google Keep directly within Google Docs as well. And I'll explain in a bit why that can be handy. As with all Google tools, collaboration is very simple in Google Keep and another nifty feature is the grab image text option in your notes. If you put an image of some typed text and if it's linear you can turn it into editable text which is really clever. It doesn't work very well with handwriting but with typed linear text, you can convert that image into actual editable text. This is a really interesting feature. Google Keep on an Audio Podcast It's a bit tricky for me to explain how you use Google Keep on an audio podcast. It's definitely something that's far better explained in a video. I've found a fantastic video on YouTube that goes through the best ways to use Google Keep and shows you everything you need to know as a teacher. You can find this below.  How To Find It  How do you find this magical, secret weapon then? Well, the easiest way is to fire up your Google Chrome browser and go to keep.google.com or you can use what we Google trainers like to call the waffle which is your shortcut menu to all of your apps. Google Keep for Teachers Now you know Google Keep is awesome, let's talk about ways teachers can use Google Keep. I've done a quick brain dump and I've come up with the following ideas. You could use Google Keep for planning, storing useful website links, storing research, comment banks, I'll come back to that, whiteboard image capturing and read it later article capturing. Let me just elaborate on two of those. Comment Banks When I say comment banks, what I mean is when you're giving electronic feedback on assignments which are created in Google Docs, if you find there are feedback comments that you are repeating on a regular basis, then you can store them in Google Keep and you can go into Google Docs and you can open up the Keep notepad from within Google Docs then you can copy and paste from Google Keep directly into Google Docs. And that's a really good way of saving time when writing feedback on assignments. Now just to be super clear, I am not suggesting that all of your feedback comments on assignments should be templated. That's not appropriate. However, there are always going to be comments you use on a regular basis. So why not set up a comment bank or feedback comment bank in Google Keep? Then you can open your Google Keep up within Google Docs, copy and paste across. Article Capture When I mentioned earlier read it later article capture what I meant was if you are online looking at interesting education articles for example and you come across a few that you think I'd really like to take some time to read those articles later, what you can do is you can send the articles directly to your Google Keep is you make use of the Google Keep Chrome extension. So this is using your Google Keep in a similar way to how apps like Pocket on Instapaper work. It's a really nice way to manage your time so you don't get kind of lost in that internet bubble where you're just browsing for something specific and you find something else that's interesting and something else. If you send those things to Google Keep, you can read them later. Google Keep as a Tool for Students The other thing to mention of course is that Google Keep can be a really handy tool for students. I'm thinking things like planning assignments, writing lists of things they need to remember, writing deadlines. But the reminder function could be particularly useful for them. So once you've mastered Google Keep then why not contemplate helping your students be more productive by using this really cool tool? Alternative Note-Taking Apps If Google Keep isn't for you there are lots of alternative note-taking apps available. A really popular one if Evernote but there is a cost attached to the full version of Evernote. For Microsoft users, there's OneNote. And there are some others on the market, for example, Bear is a really nice looking app for taking notes. I use Notability sometimes for storing PDFs that I want to annotate so I kind of class that as a note taking tool as well because you can create document and type notes. Wrap Up All of that said, if you are looking for simplicity and you are already in the Google ecosystem then you can't do much better than Google Keep in my opinion. And those are my thoughts on Google Keep. Like I said, I think it's one of Google's best-kept secrets. I really don't know why there aren't more people raving about it. So tell me, do you use Google Keep? Do your students use Google Keep? If you don't, will you consider having a go? I'd love to know. Please consider hopping into the Teaching Space staffroom which is our closed Facebook group and tell me what you think. I'd love to hear from you. Right, so that's it from me today. Thank you so much for tuning in and I hope you'll join me next time.

Episode 21 of The Teaching Space Podcast explores the use of exit tickets for assessment and evaluation with learners.  Podcast Episode 21 Transcript Welcome to The Teaching Space podcast, coming to you from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Hello, it's Martine here. Welcome to Episode 21 of The Teaching Space podcast. It's great to have you with me. Today's episode is called Excellent Exit Tickets For Assessment And Evaluation. What's an Exit Ticket? So what's an exit ticket? Well, typically it's a short assessment or evaluation activity that your students would complete before they leave the classroom. Often it will be a slip of paper which might be pre-printed to look like a ticket, or could be just a scrap of paper from your shredding bin. It could be an online exit ticket. You might use a Google Form or a Padlet or something similar. Whatever you use, the idea behind an exit ticket is that your student will complete it before they leave the session, and if they don't complete it they don't leave the session. That's the idea, at any rate. I've found that exit tickets tend to be used with young children, but I only teach adults and have had some success using them. So perhaps rethink how you're using exit tickets. They can definitely work with older learners. Some examples of exit tickets can be found on theteachingspace.com/21 Exit Tickets for Formative Assessment There are lots of ways to use an exit ticket. Personally, I find they're most useful for formative assessment. Here are some ideas on how you could use an exit ticket for formative assessment. To Answer a Question You might ask one important question from the session. So your learner has to write the answer to the question on the ticket before they leave. That's a really good way to gauge whether the main point in the session has been understood. To Summarize The Session Alternatively, you could ask your learners on the exit ticket to summarize the key points of the session. If you do this, it might be a good idea to put some bullet points, maybe three bullet points on there, so they know the sort of level of detail you're asking them to go into. Big Learning Moment and What They Need Help With  One of my favourites is to ask learners to explain one key takeaway from the session, their big learning moment that they had, and one thing that they're still a little bit hazy about and need a little bit more help with. I should add that when you do this it's really essential that you go through the exit tickets when everyone's left and make a big list of anything that learners are still hazy about, and then you follow that up. Otherwise there's not much point in doing the exit ticket exercise. Exit Tickets as Reflective Tools If you're encouraging a culture of reflection in your class, then why not use an exit ticket as a reflective tool. You can prompt your learners in the direction you'd like them to reflect. This works really well. Don't forget that you can incorporate stretch and challenge into the use of exit tickets, because not everybody needs to have the same ticket. If you've got some learners who have achieved mastery in the session and need to be stretched a little further, then give them a more challenging exit ticket, there are definite opportunities for differentiation within the use of exit tickets. Exit Tickets for Evaluation They're not just an assessment tool though. You can use exit tickets for evaluation; you can use them to check the quality of your session. I find that pre-printed exit tickets work best for this purpose. You might have a "What went well? Even better if ..." type exit ticket. So you might have WWW and then EBI on a different line, and ask for some feedback in that way. If you're dealing with young learners, then maybe a smiley face type scale could be an alternative. Using Prompts While it's perfectly fine to just use a blank sheet of paper for your exit ticket, I've found that prompts tend to give you a better quality of response. So the sort of prompts you could include on your exit ticket might be: "Write one thing you learned today." Or, "Write one thing you'd like more help to understand." These prompts also work really well in the first person. So you might have something like: "Today I enjoyed ..." "Today I found it confusing when ..." Or, "Please explain more about ..." How Do You Make an Exit Ticket? Let's talk about how you make an exit ticket. I think there are three options here. 1. Verbal Exit Ticket You could take the path of least resistance and simply have a verbal exit ticket. This would work best with younger learners, I think. So you would stand at the door to your classroom, you would issue a question to the group, give them some thinking time, get them to line up at the door, and answer the question on the way out. So that would be your simple option for a verbal exit ticket. 2. Paper Exit Ticket The mid-level option would be a paper exit ticket. It could be a scrap of plain paper, you put a question on the board and they write the answer. Or you could take the next step up and have a pre-printed ticket with prompts, and that would be what I recommend in the first instance, because I think it's best for the learner. These pre-printed exit tickets could be created in Microsoft Word or Google Docs. What I've found is the easiest thing to do is just to create a table, a two column table, questions on the left and space for an answer on the right. That works very nicely. 3. Online Exit Ticket If you want to take a tech approach, then I highly recommend using Google Forms. But this is really only going to work if your learners are on a computer at the end of the session. You know, if they've put their technology away or they're not allowed to use mobile phones for whatever reason, this isn't going to be the best format. Certainly for my adult learners I've found that Google Forms work really well. If you create a QR code with the link to the Google Form that makes things even easier as well. I like to get my learners using their devices, scanning the code, completing the exit ticket, and then going. If it's appropriate, with a Google Form you can have the responses in a Google sheet on your board as people leave. It might not be appropriate to share what everyone else is putting in the exit ticket, but you never know, it might be. My Preference Now, I have a confession to make, even though I am a very tech-orientated teacher, I am a Google certified trainer so I love Google tools, the best way to do exit tickets, in my opinion, is the pre-printed slip. It's nice and easy. You've made it once, you can print it as many times as you like. It's very quick for you to see the responses. I really like a pre-printed exit ticket. Template Exit Ticket With this in mind, I have a little gift for you. I have a template exit ticket that you're very welcome to use in your classroom. Here will find links to two options for the exit ticket, I've got a PDF version, which you can simply print out, I've also got a Google Doc template version for you. So when you click on the link what's going to happen is, Google will ask you if you want to make a copy of my template document, and you will answer, "Yes", and it will save in your Google Drive. Pop over to theteachingspace.com/21 to grab these. So you've got a PDF option and you've got a Google Doc template option. You don't have to opt-in to any newsletter or anything like that to get these freebies. They are just there for you to use. Wrap Up I'd love to know your thoughts on exit tickets and whether you have a chance to try out my templates that I've provided. The best way to chat about this sort of thing is to join The Teaching Space Staff Room, that's our closed Facebook group, I'll pop a link in the show notes for you. Right, that's all from me today. I hope you enjoyed the episode and I hope you'll join me next time.

Episode 20 of The Teaching Space Podcast explores nine classroom backchannel tools that can be used for communication between learners. Podcast Episode 20 Transcript Welcome to The Teaching Space Podcast, coming to you from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Hello, it's Martine here. Welcome to Episode 20 of The Teaching Space Podcast. Today's episode is all about backchannel tools. If you've not come across the phrase backchannel before, I will explain it to you. What is a Backchannel? A backchannel is a way for learners to have an on-topic conversation during a teaching session, this could be anything from learners in your class to delegates on a corporate course. Whoever they are, this is a way for them to either talk during the session and maybe submit questions, or even continue the conversation afterwards. The main reason for this episode is that I recently found out one of my favourite backchannel tools, TodaysMeet is closing its doors in June 2018. This, therefore, seemed like the ideal opportunity to look at some alternatives. I have nine classroom backchannel tools for you to try. 1. Mentimeter Mentimeter allows you to create interactive presentations, so the backchannel bit is the ability to pose questions and get votes from your audience. It's a freemium tool, which means you have a free version with limited options, and there are paid options as well. A few of the tools I'm going to mention are freemium. 2. GoSoapBox GoSoapBox allows you to create digital events. An event is a space on the internet where you can interact with your learners, and you can have polls and discussions, question and answers, that sort of thing. A nice feature of GoSoapBox is it includes a confusion barometer, which you can use to gauge understanding. GoSoapBox is free for classes of up to 30 students, so this could be a really exciting tool for teachers to experiment with. 3. AnswerGarden AnswerGarden is a minimalist feedback tool. It's good for creative brainstorming, very simple Q&A, and feedback gathering. You could only provide short answers as a participant using AnswerGarden. And good news, it's free. 4. Google Classroom Full disclosure here, as a Google certified trainer this is my main backchannel tool, and I love it. So Google Classroom is part of the G Suite for Education set of apps, and it's an online classroom for storing resources, issuing assignments, asking questions, and that sort of thing. But an element of it that is sometimes overlooked is the stream. When you go into a classroom, it's the first thing you come to. And this can be really effectively used as a backchannel because there could be chat there. So if you're already a Google Classroom user, don't overlook it as a possible backchannel tool. And of course, as it's G Suite for Education, it's free. 5. Google Slides You might be thinking, why are you including Google Slides on a backchannel list? Well, there's a good reason, let me explain. Before I do, I'll tell you that Google Slides is essentially the Google version of Microsoft PowerPoint, it's a presentation tool. But there is one particular area where it's way better than PowerPoint, and that is it's got a Q&A option attached to it. You have audience participation elements built into Google Slides, and this is what makes it a backchannel tool, essentially. You can do a presentation and your audience members can pose questions, and then you can project the question on the board, and you can answer questions, so that there's a backchannel element going on. Participants can also upvote popular questions. It's really worth having a play with. Here is the video about how to use the audience participation aspect of Google Slides. 6. Twitter Using Twitter as a backchannel can be great, particularly if you work with adult learners. You're going to find a lot of your learners are on Twitter already, and they'll have an understanding of what a hashtag is, which is handy because you can use a hashtag to group  tweets under a certain conversation. It might not be the most appropriate tool for younger learners, but certainly, in my experience, the simplicity of Twitter makes it a great backchannel. It's free; there's an element of forced brevity because tweets can only be up to 280 characters. You can share images, and that sort of thing as well. So you can rethink how you use Twitter, it can be an effective backchannel. 7. Backchannel Chat This is a free chatroom designed with teachers in mind. It's really easy to set up; you don't need to get your learners to log in. It's freemium, but I happened to notice that the full paid program is just $15 a year, so that might be worth looking into. I've not played with Backchannel Chat as much as I'd like, but it's certainly on my list of things to experiment with. 8. Padlet I talked about Padlet in Episode 15 of The Teaching Space Podcast. If you hop over to theteachingspace.com/15 then you can hear or read my comments on Padlet. Essentially, it's an online bulletin board, like a notice board. And what I really like about it, is there is a backchannel layout which you can select. Padlet's had a bit of a hard time recently because they've just changed their charging model. Now you can have just a limited number of Padlets for free, and then you have to pay to have sort of more options, so it's a freemium model. I can understand the backlash, I get it, I really do, and as teachers, we don't have a budget to spend on tools like this. However, I also understand that as a business they need to find a way to be sustainable, so I kind of get why they've done it. Whatever you think about that, Padlet is a really great tool, so I recommend you give it a try. 9. Tozzl That's T-O-Z-Z-L. What a lovely word. I like this tool on the basis of its name alone. Tozzl is a digital pin board, message board, type thing. It's password protected, and as a teacher that makes me feel nice and comfortable. There's that nice extra layer of security. It's free, which also makes my heart sing. It's quite a new tool for me, so I've not had a chance to dig into it quite as much as I'd like. However, I found a great video on YouTube that explains everything about Tozzl which you can find just above.  Our Community There you have it, nine classroom backchannel tools you can start using today. I would love to know if you try one or some, or all of these tools. The best way to start a conversation about backchannels, or anything technology for learning related, is to join The Teaching Space Staff Room which is our closed Facebook group. It's a small group at the moment, a little quiet, I'd love to see a bit more conversation going on in there. If you've not had a chance to join, please, please, please, please do so.; You will need to request to join, it's not an automatic thing, but I will do my best to accept your request as soon as possible. Wrap Up Okay, I think that's all from me today. Thank you so much for listening to this short and sweet, but hopefully valuable episode, and I hope you'll join me next time.

Episode 19 of The Teaching Space Podcast explores how teachers use social media for personal and professional development and networking. Podcast Episode 19 Transcript Welcome to the Teaching Space Podcast, coming to you from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Hello, it's Martine here. Welcome to Episode 19 of the Teaching Space Podcast. Today I'm going to be giving you the lowdown on teachers and social media. Well, I say lowdown. This is a 10-minute episode, so it's quite difficult to give you the lowdown in 10 minutes, but I'm going to try. Q and A  I'm focusing on teachers using social media for personal and professional development and networking, not to connect with students. And I thought the easiest way to do this episode would be a Q and A format, so essentially I'm going to interview myself. I hope this works well. Anyway, let's give it a try. Question: Are you against using social media with students then? Answer: In principle, no, I'm not, assuming the students are of an appropriate age. I've seen many cases where teachers have used social media to communicate with their learners, and have also used it as an opportunity to teach learners about being safe online. However, for me, and this is very much a personal view, I believe it's safer to use school or college provided channels for communication. This is about me being safe, my professional identity. Examples So I'll give you some examples. My adult learners, I teach initial teacher training. They're in an evening class and a Saturday morning class, and also some bespoke classes. We have a Google classroom, and my students download the Google Classroom app on their mobile device, and every time I post something in there, they get a notification, so that works really well. Other schools and colleges might have their own internal social media-like platform. We have one, which is called GCFE Connect, and it's a little bit like Twitter, a little bit like Facebook, but it is only for members of the college, so it's locked down and it's safe. That's how I feel about using social media with students. Question: But if you really do want to use social media with students, should you have a separate profile? Answer: Yes, if the platform allows it. It's easy to do on Twitter. You can have as many Twitter accounts as you like as long as you have a separate email address associated, but last time I looked, having two Facebook profiles is against the rules. That being said, if Facebook is your platform of choice, you can safely use Facebook Groups, because you don't have to be friends with your students to do that. If you are going to use Facebook, lock down your privacy settings, and don't use it or any other social media platform to connect directly with individual students. Absolutely check your school or college's policies and good practice guides on social media use, when it comes to this sort of thing. Don't just take my word for it. Question: What platforms do you use professionally? Answer: I use Facebook for The Teaching Space Staff Room, which is our closed Facebook group. I also am a member of some other educational Facebook groups, like the Society for Education and Training group and a few others. I don't use Facebook for many other things, to be honest. I use Twitter (you can find TTS Twitter here) for connecting with teachers mostly, and for getting lots of CPD and links to really interesting stuff. I also use Instagram with a focus on Instagram Stories. I'm also on LinkedIn, but I don't really do anything with LinkedIn, other than push content to it, so I really can't speak with any authority whatsoever about LinkedIn. However feel free to take a look at my LinkedIn here. Question: What are your top tips for using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? Answer: Facebook, I would recommend you stick to using Facebook Groups because it's the safest way, I think, to protect your professional identity, and there are some great people to connect with on Facebook. However, it is a very distracting platform, so if you are spending time on Facebook for professional reasons, chances are you're going to spend a lot of time on there looking at Tom Hiddleston gifs and cat videos if you're anything like me. I also recommend you have your privacy settings on Facebook locked down and you check them regularly. Personally, I have a very small number of friends on Facebook. I tend to use it to keep in touch with people who perhaps don't live on Guernsey, and I want to catch up with them from time to time. Facebook isn't my favourite social platform if I'm really honest. Twitter Let's talk about Twitter. As far as teachers are concerned, I genuinely think Twitter is where it's at. There are lots of teachers on Twitter, and you can really get some great information from there. My top tips for using Twitter as a teacher, start conversations, talk to people, post regularly, share content, share your own stuff, but also share other people's stuff as well. Re-tweet great content. Ask questions and get a conversation going. Twitter's an amazing platform. I love the forced brevity of whatever it is, 280 characters. You can just get straight to the point, and share really great stuff, so Twitter, definitely a place that teachers should be. Instagram If you look at my Instagram account, you'll know that from a teaching space perspective, I am no expert on Instagram. I'm struggling a bit with being somebody who likes to take creative photographs. My Instagram aesthetic for the teaching space isn't quite right. However, what I am loving are Instagram Stories. I love being able to talk to camera, and share snippets of my day, so at the moment I'm tending to do on my main Instagram feed, I'm tending to share quotes and links to the latest podcast episodes, and things like that. That's not terribly exciting from an Instagram user's perspective, but Instagram Stories are amazing, so I really recommend you have a go at Instagram Stories and start connecting with other teachers on Instagram that way. Top Tips for Social Media In terms of general top tips for social media use, don't feel you have to be on every single platform. Use the ones you enjoy. Use the ones where you can find your people. Don't post anything that negatively reflects on you or your profession. I really hope that's a no-brainer, but I thought I should mention it anyway. And finally, and this is the big takeaway, I would really love it if you took this onboard, and that is start creating your own content, and sharing and talking about it on social, whether it's a blog or a podcast or a YouTube channel. Content Curation v Creation If you can start creating your own content, you are going to have plenty to talk about on social media, and you're giving something back to those people on social who already give so much, and I think that is, of all the things you can do as a teacher on social media, creating your own content and sharing it, and talking about it online is going to help you develop personally and professionally in the most amazing way. Content curation is fabulous, and you will learn a lot from that, but content creation is going to be even better. The Low Down and Feedback  Okay, so that's the lowdown, except it wasn't really a very big lowdown. It was like a little lowdown, but I hope it was useful to get you thinking about the benefits of social media from a personal and professional development perspective. I'd love to hear about your thoughts on this. Are you on social? Have you been frightened to go on social media? Is it something your school or college doesn't really encourage? Wrap Up Come and chat to me in the Facebook group. I would love to hear from you. I think it's a discussion that we need to have, and I can't wait to hear what you've got to say. And that's all from me today. I hope you've enjoyed the episode, and I hope you'll tune in next time.

Podcast Episode 18 Transcript Welcome to The Teaching Space podcast, coming to you from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Hello and welcome to Episode 18 of The Teaching Space podcast. It's Martine here. Thank you so much for joining me. In this episode, I want to encourage you to question the idea of digital natives. I hear a lot about digital natives versus digital immigrants when the topic of ed tech comes up in my staff room and other staff rooms that I have the privilege of visiting. Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants Before we get into the discussion about whether digital natives and digital immigrants are even a thing, let's rewind a little bit and, I'll tell you about when these terms were first used. Back in 2001, Marc Prensky wrote an essay, which coined the term digital natives and digital immigrants. He was getting at the fact that our students are digital natives and the teachers, most of the teachers, tend to be digital immigrants. This is a direct quote from the essay regarding Prensky's description of our students.  "Our students today are all native speakers of the digital language of computers, video games, and the internet." In other words, our students have been brought up with technology. That's what they know. They get technology naturally and, they have this innate ability to multitask when it comes to tech. They can be watching a YouTube video and typing up an assignment at the same time. Allegedly.  Marc Prensky's Essay Digital immigrants, on the other hand, are people who have not necessarily grown up with technology and have had to learn how to use everything and adopt new ways of working as a result. Incidentally, here is a link to Prensky's essay. In his essay, Prensky, (it's not very easy to say) Prensky goes on to explain that because teachers tend to be digital immigrants and students tend to be digital natives, they are speaking totally different languages. The result of this is that teachers really need to adapt the way they teach to the learners. A Different Language? At this point, I want to remind you that the reason for this very short episode is to get you to start challenging the idea that our students are digital natives, so hold that thought for just a minute. While I believe that, in many cases, teachers speak a different language to their learners, I believe assuming our learners are digital natives can be quite dangerous. I want to question why we assume that they are something different to us. Is it because we're worried that they know more than us? Is that a genuine fear that teachers have? I'm only talking, of course, when it comes to technology here. Question it though. Online Safety Your learners might be able to intuitively use things like the latest iPhone and navigate apps like Snapchat, but often they don't have a clue about being safe online or using technology for anything other than social interactions. Really are these interactions social? Chances are, they don't have a clue about their digital footprint.  Snapchat As a quick aside, have you ever tried to use Snapchat? I'm not even joking when I say it's impossible. Yet, give it to a 15-year-old and they instantly know how to use it. It's fascinating. I don't question the fact that young people's brains are wired differently today. That I can agree with. What I can't agree with is that these kids that we're teaching know all there is to know about tech because they certainly don't. Multitasking And that's where this multitasking thing, study after study, proves that there is no such thing as multitasking. What learners are doing if they are looking at Twitter, and writing an assignment, and listening to Spotify, and watching a YouTube video, they aren't concentrating on all of those things at the same time. Our brains aren't wired to do that. What we're doing is switching between tasks. When you switch between tasks really quickly, you're unable to get into a state of flow, a really deep state of concentration. So, you're only ever taking in information at a sort of surface level.  If you're interested in exploring this concept a little bit further, you might want to listen to one of my previous episodes about the Pomodoro Technique and, you can find that at TheTeachingSpace.com/12.  Modern-Day Student I'm not questioning the fact that kids today are different to kids 20 years ago. I mean, they are overstimulated with all of the information and the distractions out there, and I think that creates a huge number of challenges for them. Learners today are different but they're only different in the way that every single learner you teach is different and always has been. When you teach a class of 20 people, they are 20 individuals and that has always been the case. If we go back to one of the fundamental things you learn when you do your teacher training, the first stage of the teaching, learning, and assessment cycle is identifying the needs of your learners. Off the back of that, you plan the learning, and then you facilitate the learning, and then you assess the learning, and so on, and so forth. The Fundamentals of Teaching Haven't Changed Even though there is clearly a difference with today's learners, we can almost approach it in a similar way. As long as we identify the needs of our learners and accommodate those needs, then surely we are going to create the learning experience we want to. We need to identify our learners' needs, get to know them really well, and work with them to understand how they learn best. We need to find ways to help them avoid multitasking, and that's really challenging. Again, I recommend you check out the Pomodoro Technique in Episode 12.  Sharing Strategies We also need to be really careful we don't make assumptions about our learners' functional level of online literacy. It's very difficult to delve into this important topic in just 10 minutes. What I wanted to do with this episode is just maybe spark a few thoughts for you, and I'd really love it if we could carry on the discussion in The Teaching Space Staffroom, which is our closed Facebook group. There is a mild irony of having a chat about all this stuff on a social media platform where are loads of distractions but just go with me there. It would be really great to hear your thoughts on this. I'd love to know about challenges that you're facing in your classroom. Whether you've found you've had to adapt your practice over, say, the last 5 or 10 years. It would be great if you co could share some strategies for helping our learners navigate this very complicated tech-heavy world that we live in today. Articles I read quite a few interesting articles in preparation for this episode, such as this from Quartz which challenges the idea of the Digital Native being the child, and is interesting to read beside this article about the Myth of the Digital Native.  Another article to check out is this one from The Teacher Toolkit, which not only looks briefly at the Myth of the Digital Native but eleven other the best ‘worst’ research myths and legends. Wrap Up Okay, it's time for me to wrap things up, but before I go, I have a cheeky favour to ask. If you've enjoyed this episode or any previous episodes of The Teaching Space podcast, please consider leaving a positive review on iTunes. It's really helpful for when other teachers are searching for education podcasts. If The Teaching Space has lots of positive reviews, then we go straight to the top of the search results. If you'd be kind enough to consider leaving a positive review, I'd be really grateful.  Okay, that's it. I'll see in the Facebook group and I hope you'll tune in to the next episode. Thanks for listening.

Episode 17 of The Teaching Space Podcast explores how you can set up your mobile phone for maximum efficiency. Podcast Episode 17 Transcript Welcome to the Teaching Space podcast. Coming to you from Guernsey in The Channel Islands.  Hello and welcome to Episode 17 of the Teaching Space Podcast. It's Martine here. Thank you so much for joining me. In this episode, I'm going to talk to you about a subject very dear to my heart and that's productivity. Companion Video In particular, we are going to focus on how you can set up your mobile phone so you are the boss of it and you use it on your terms and it isn't the constant distraction that I suspect it probably is for you right now. Teaching is such a busy job and I think it can become easier to manage if we are in charge of our time. And I think managing your mobile phone in an appropriate way very much forms part of that. Incidentally, talking to you about my mobile phone setup is quite a visual thing so I have also recorded a companion video for this podcast episode which you can find here. Wallpaper and Screensaver Image Just to give you a bit of context I use an iPhone. I have at the moment an iPhone 7 Plus so it's quite big but that doesn't make a great deal of difference to how I've got it set up. The first thing I would recommend you do is to select a wallpaper and a screensaver image that when you look at it makes you feel relaxed. So for me, that's something very plain, lots of white space. My current picture is a pen and a clipboard if I remember correctly. Choose your screensaver image and your wallpaper image really carefully. What I tend to do is use one of my favourite free photo websites. These are photographs you can use without attributing the photo to the photographer. So something like unsplash.com. If you hop over there and have a look you'll find a photo you'll really like and use the same one for your wallpaper and your screensaver. Home Screen The next step is to remove all of your apps from your home screen. Send them to your second screen. Yes, you heard me right. No apps on your home screen. You've got a little bar along the bottom of your iPhone where you can keep a few frequently used apps so you can keep that. For me, I've got there my Gmail app, my Google Chrome browser, my phone app and my Google calendar. So they are along the bottom but otherwise nothing on that home screen. When you pick up the phone you just see that beautiful image and a couple of apps along the bottom. Screen Two On that second screen, so when you swipe to see the next screen, set up one folder and put all of your apps in there. While you're putting your apps in there, delete those you don't use very often. Take this opportunity to have a bit of clear out. I appreciate that I'm explaining my process in relation to iPhone but it's my understanding that other devices work in a similar way. Set up one folder for all of your apps. If you're on the iPhone then you can search for apps by swiping down and just type in the name of the app so therefore having everything all in the same folder makes a lot of sense to me rather than having various folders for different types of apps.  Notifications The next step is a slightly scary one for some people but when you think it through, really it's a no-brainer. And that is turn notifications off. Don't have notifications on apps. It's not good for your mental health. I'll give you the example of your email app. For example, if you've got your Gmail app and this little red circle and it says, 5,000 because you've got 5,000 emails in there, that is not good for you to be constantly reminded of that. Turn notifications off on the vast majority of your apps. Don't have pings to your phone telling you something's happened and you need to look at it. That goes for social media and everything. Get rid of these notifications, just use your phone on your terms. My Apps If you have a look at the companion video you'll see that there are one or two apps that I have little reminders on but next to nothing. I have a reminder on my journal app because that is the one thing I am trying to get into a daily practice with so I get a little ping every day to remind me to journal. (Check out Episode 14 on The Power of Journalling for Teachers here ) Also any software updates I need to do on my watch or on my phone I get notified of those but that's it. No other notifications.  To see the notifications if have like me one or two, in your apps folder if you're on an iPhone, all you need to do is a long press. And again, you'll see this on the video companion to this podcast episode. Frequent Apps Outside of that apps folder, I suggest you have no more than five to seven apps. I have my frequently used apps outside of the apps folder. For example, Slack I use regularly to communicate with team members and accountability partners and that sort of thing. I also have Notability outside of my apps folder because it is an app that I use every single day for taking notes and annotating PDFs and that sort of thing. Finally, I have Asana, my project management app outside of my apps folder as well and that's it.  Use Your Phone on Your Terms That's how I set my phone up for maximum productivity. And I think the key thing to remember is use your phone on your terms. Ultimately if you're doing that you're going to be spending more time, more focused time on the work you're doing which has deadlines and then your phone can be something you do during your break. For example if you use the Pomodoro technique to get your work done, and I've talked about that in a previous episode. But when you take your Pomodoro break you can look at your phone and you're doing so on your terms. Self-Control and Avoiding Distraction Try not to have your phone in your eye line. Stick it in your bag, hide it, turn it over. Even though you don't have the distraction of notifications you still might want to pick it up when you're not supposed to be looking at it. It's all about self-control. You might be thinking Martine; I'm an adult, I don't have to do this sort of thing. I'll do what I like. The point of me explaining to you how to maximize your phone for absolute efficiency is that you're probably also the person who is saying, "Martine I don't have time to do stuff." Trust me when I say if you can take charge of your mobile device you are going to generate more time to focus on the stuff you really want to get done. Try It! Why don't you give it a go? Have a look at the video. Try it for a week. Try it for a month if you're feeling brave. And then let me know how you get on. I would love to hear from you. If you'd like to chat about mobile phone setup and productivity for teachers generally then one of the best places to do that is in our closed Facebook group called The Teaching Space Staffroom. If you hop over to Facebook, search for The Teaching Space Staffroom, ask to join the group and I will approve you as soon as possible. And once you're in, let's talk teacher productivity. As I said at the start, it's one of my favourite subjects. Go on. Give it a try. You know you want to have a minimalist mobile phone, I can just feel it. Wrap Up Right. So that's all for me in today's short and sweet episode. I really hope you enjoyed it. Don't forget to check out the companion video,  and join us in the closed Facebook group The Teaching Space Staffroom. Thank you so much for listening and I hope you'll join me next time. 

Podcast Episode 16 Transcript Welcome to The Teaching Space Podcast coming to you from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Hello and welcome to Episode 16 of The Teaching Space Podcast. It's Martine here. Thanks for joining me. Today's episode is not going to be in the usual format. It is taking the format of an audio diary. Let me tell you why.... On the 23rd, 24th, and 25th of March, there was a Google Summit in London, and I was lucky enough to be asked to speak at the event. This is my first time speaking at an event like this as an educator and a Google Certified Trainer, and it was quite nerve-racking, I have to say. I thought it would be a nice idea for the podcast to record some audio snippets from the event and share them with you, so what follows is an audio diary covering my experience. I hope you enjoy it. Ooh, before I forget, I should mention the audio I recorded was on my mobile device, so if the quality isn't as good as normal, that's the reason. Okay, let's go. The French College Hello, it's Martine here. I thought I'd record an audio diary of my experience of the London Google Summit. I've just arrived at the Lycee International de Londres. Please excuse my pronunciation. Well, it was a bit awkward getting in. I had to speak to the security guard, and they checked my name, and it wasn't on the list, and it wasn't on the list, and then it was on the list, so that was interesting, but I'm here now, and I appear to be the only one. My obsessive approach to punctuality was paying off there as usual. I'm in a gorgeous classroom, and there is coffee, and there are croissants because it's a French college, so I'm going to help myself. I shall check in later and let you know how my sessions go and what I learn from the sessions I attend. Delivering My First Session Hello. It's Martine here. Okay, so I have just done my first session, and it was called How to Mark Smarter and Faster With Google. This was a session I was delivering. When I said I've done my first session, I mean I've delivered my first session. It was an hour long, and it went really well. It was well attended, and we did about half an hour's sort of chit-chat and demonstration and a bit of presentation from me, and then we had half an hour for people to basically have a play with the tools that I taught them about.  Tool One: Loom The three tools that I shared were Loom, which is a Chrome extension for recording your screen. Tool Two: Google Keep I also showed the learners how to open up Google Keep in Google Docs and, essentially, store your frequently used feedback comments in Google Keep on a sort of digital Post-It Note and then open that up within Google Docs and then put your comments into comments on Google Docs, if that makes sense. I will share a video explaining that in a bit more detail. I promise I did a better job in the session that I delivered.  Tool Three: Google Forms I also shared how to use Google Forms with the quiz option enabled, and this allows you to create self-grading forms or quizzes, and that can be really useful for formative feedback because you can input a variety of different types of comment based on whether the learner has got the answer right or wrong. So if someone's got an answer wrong, you can then maybe signpost them to extra resources like a video or something like that. If you were doing a quiz on English punctuation, and someone did an apostrophe wrong then selected the wrong answer, then you could maybe direct them to a video about apostrophes.  Summary Of Session One Those are the three things I covered. Link: How to Mark Faster and Smarter with Google Presentation . You will be able to jump into that presentation and see lots of other links. I hope that's useful to you, and I will try my very best to record a little sound bite after I've done my next session. Now, my next session is The Life-Changing Magic of Electronic Filing. My audience was a bit quiet this morning, so I'm not entirely sure how that's going to go down with them, but let's see. Over and out. Second Session It's me. I just finished my second session, which was The Life-Changing Magic of Electronic Filing. It wasn't as well attended as the first, I have to say, but I kind of, on the fly, converted it into a very informal sit around the table and talked about Google Drive, and that actually ended up working really well, so I'm really pleased. Final Reflection Hello. It's me again. I thought I'd record a final reflection on the whole experience. Just to give you a bit of background which I should probably have done this at the start. The reason I knew about these Google Summits was that the company that organizes them, AppsEvents, came to Guernsey and did a Google Summit, and it was really good, very well organised great speakers, and all that stuff. I attended the summit and kind of sat there thinking, "This is awesome, but I could probably speaking because I know some stuff too as a Google certified trainer," so it was going to the initial summit that kind of made me have the confidence to pitch myself as a speaker for this London event. The fact that it was in London and it wasn't too difficult to get to, it was a quick flight, also made it really appealing. Pitching  I find it really hard pitching myself for things. When I was 20, I think I would have had no problem pitching myself at all, which is really ironic, as I knew a heck of a lot less when I was 20, but I think, as I get older, I get a little bit more anxious about things like that. Anyway, I pitched myself. They wanted me to do the summit, and that was all fine and dandy. Networking Perspective Reflecting on the whole experience of being a teacher and a speaker at these type of events, I can honestly say it was brilliant. I had some great conversations with people who I'm really hoping will end up listening to The Teaching Space Podcast as a result. Met some amazing teacher folks and education folks who I'm really hoping that I'll have further contact with and they'll be sort of people I can share ideas with in the future, so just simply from a networking perspective, it was fantastic. Personal Development From a personal development perspective, I've pushed myself outside of my comfort zone by pitching myself for an event and being anxious about it. The two sessions I ran went very well. On reflection, the second one was not pitched at a high enough level for the group, but then I didn't really know that until I got there, so that was a useful learning experience. It looks like most people who attend these events tend to be on the more advanced side, so I know that for future, which is brilliant. That being said, the people that I worked with had a great time, so I'm really happy. Feedback  The feedback came in, and the feedback on my sessions was really good, excellent, in fact, so I'm thrilled about that. I am hoping that AppsEvents will want me to work with them again, so sort of major reflection on it being pushing yourself outside your comfort zone is a really good thing. It's been a confidence boost. If you ever, dear listener, get an opportunity to speak at an event of this nature, then I really encourage you to go for it. It is nerve-racking. It is, like I said, pushing yourself outside your comfort zone, but I think the learning I got from it far outweighed the anxiety I initially felt, as it usually does when you put yourself outside your comfort zone. Learning Perspective From a learning perspective, I didn't attend too many sessions because I was kind of wanting to balance my energy on the day. That was another sort of positive move on my part, I feel. I didn't go to all of the sessions in between mine. I very carefully picked what I attended. One of the highlights for me was I attending a session on Google Apps Script, which was a programming session to enable you to create extensions and things like that. Yes, it was as geeky as it sounds, I can promise you that, but while I didn't sort of, during the session, create my own extension or anything like that, I got a sort of foundational understanding of what Google Apps Script is all about, and it certainly made me interested in exploring that more.  All in All... All in all, a fantastic weekend. I'm really grateful to the people who supported me throughout it. I must give a shout out to my friend Gemma, although she won't be listening, but she put me up for the weekend. We had a lovely time, so that was excellent. Like I said, if you get a similar opportunity, I really recommend you push yourself outside of that comfort zone and give it a go. That's me, over and out. If you're a brand-new listener to The Teaching Space Podcast, then this is not the regular format, as I said at the start of the show, but a lot of my listeners were very supportive and keen to hear about how the event went, so in response to that, I wanted to share just a few thoughts and a few snippets, not particularly coherently, but it was kind of captured in the moment, so I hope that works for you.  Wrap Up I'm going to wrap things up now, but just before I go, if you are not a member of The Teaching Space Facebook group, it's called The Teaching Space Staff Room, then it would be great to have you there. We've had some good conversation going on recently. It's a great place to network and share ideas and talk to other teachers in confidence, so hop over to Facebook and look for The Teaching Space Staff Room, and you can ask to join the group. Thanks for tuning in to this episode, and I hope you'll join me next time. 

Episode 15 of The Teaching Space Podcast explores two edtech tTools to try this week. ***04/04/18: since recording this episode, Padlet has introduced a new pricing structure - the free option only allows you 3 walls. While this is a bit disappointing, Padlet is still a great tool and I very much recommend it.*** Podcast Episode 15 Transcript Welcome to The Teaching Space Podcast, coming to you from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Hello, it's Martine here. Welcome to Episode 15 of The Teaching Space podcast. Thanks so much for joining me. In this episode, I'm going to share two ed tech tools that I think you're going to want to try this week or indeed next week. What is Padlet? The first tool is Padlet, and it can be found at padlet.com.  What is Padlet? Well, it's kind of an online bulletin board or notice board. That's how they describe it on the website, but actually, it's so much more than that. I really think of it as a collaborative online space. You can share all sorts of different things on a Padlet, for example, written notes, photographs, web links, all sorts of stuff. Teachers can sign in using their Google credentials, so if you are a G Suite for Education establishment, then this is really convenient. Students don't require an account to use a Padlet. However, there are some benefits from them signing up for an account. For example, you can see the username of the person who is posting on the Padlet, and sometimes that's useful, particularly for assessment purposes. But, again, your learner can use their Google credentials, so it's nice and easy. What I love about Padlet is its accessibility. It's so easy to use, so even the most nervous tech users will feel quite confident using a Padlet. It looks great, too.  My Experience Using Padlet Padlet is web-based, but there are also a number of different apps and browser extensions you can use with Padlet. I've been thinking about use cases for Padlet, and there are so many. The first time I used Padlet was ... it was quite a few years ago, to be fair, but it was to gather ideas from a group of students. We were planning an event, and we were coming up with different ideas for different types of events. So, I set up a Padlet and the students just put all of their ideas for events on to the Padlet, then we organized it and narrowed it down to our chosen event. That's just one way you can use a Padlet.  I'm also using Padlet at the moment as an experiment for The Teaching Space Book Club. Incidentally, if you are interested in our book club, hop over to theteachingspace.com/book-club to find out more. Using Padlet for the book club is still a bit of an experiment and I will report back to you on how that goes, but essentially the setup is simple. There's a column layout and I share a variety of different questions about the book, and then participants can post underneath the questions. So, it's a nice simple layout. I'm thinking it's gonna work quite well, but I will report back.  Backchannel Padlet can make a really good backchannel. For example, if you're teaching a session to a large group of people and you want somewhere they can go online to make a note of questions for you to deal with, perhaps after the session or in a second session or something like that, then use Padlet as a backchannel. They have got a fairly new backchannel layout feature. I've given it a try once. From my point of view, there were a few things missing but I suspect Padlet will be ironing out those little hiccoughs because it's such a new feature. It's definitely worth exploring. Online Portfolios Padlets can also work as online portfolios because ultimately you're using it as a space to bring lots of different links and pieces of work together. It could be fun to do as an exit ticket, so perhaps at the end of a session you ask learners to share one thing that they've taken away from that session on the Padlet and then you can perhaps look at the Padlet in the next session and use it as a recap.  Padlet and Parental Communication It might be a nice tool for parental communication. Now, I've not tried this, because I deal with adults. I teach adults on a daily basis. Communicating with parents isn't something I have to do. However, I do know a lot of people have used Padlet for things like class newsletters. That might be worth exploring. Here is a link to a great blog post I found, called 30 Creative Ways to Use Padlet for Teachers and Students How Much Is Padlet? On to pricing. Now, Padlet is a free tool, and the free version of Padlet is fantastic. There are premium options and I've upgraded to the lowest level of premium option, just 'cause it gives me a couple of extra features that are handy for my book club setup. I'd say that most people wouldn't need to upgrade, though. My upgrade has cost me $34 a year, and that's worth it just for the book club side of things. What is Flipgrid? Next up is Flipgrid. Everyone seems to be talking about Flipgrid at the moment, so I apologise for jumping on the bandwagon, but it is a really good tool. It's a video discussion tool. So, what happens is, the teacher creates a grid, then a topic, and generates a grid code. If you've used Kahoot before, this is very similar to how students would join a Kahoot. They get the app on their phone or in their browser and they just put in the code and then they join. So, this means that learners don't have to have a specially set up account, which is usually quite handy. How Does It Work? On that topic grid, then, the teacher could, for example, pose a question and that involves the teacher recording a quick video on their mobile device, for example, or via their laptop. And, students can respond with videos themselves. So, it's a video-to-video collection area. All of the videos are presented in a grid, and it's really easy for students to watch each others' video. That's quite a complicated explanation to really get to grips with Flipgrid, is. If you can see it in action, I highly recommend it. There'll be some decent videos on YouTube, I'm sure, to show it in action. Flipgrid Feedback There are many good things about Flipgrid. I've had great feedback from the learners that I've used it with. Another great thing is it talks to Google, so teachers can sign in using their Google credentials, and the mobile device apps are excellent. Most people who have used Flipgrids I've set up have recorded their video on their mobile devices, because you download the free app, you put in the grid code and you hit record. It is as simple as that. The App and Nervous Students Flipgrid is fantastic for giving a voice to students who perhaps wouldn't speak up in class. Then you might be thinking, well, if they don't speak up in class, then they aren't going to fancy recording a video of themselves, but you'd be surprised. A lot of colleagues I know who have used it with young people have found that even the shyest learner is okay with recording a video. Now, interestingly, I used Flipgrid with adults and I suspect I had more issues with adults being nervous about videoing themselves compared to the younger students. I predict a very bright future for Flipgrid. It's an innovative tool, which gives a voice to students who might not ordinarily have one, and that's amazing. The Only Downside There is one thing that I wasn't so keen on with Flipgrid, which I'll mention now. I'm hoping it's something they might improve later on, and that is the ability for students to give feedback to each other and also teacher feedback, both video and written. They encourage video feedback from the teacher. That's kind of built in, but you have to invest in the paid option to get more sophisticated feedback options. I think there need to be some improvements there. But, don't let that put you off giving Flipgrid a try. It's fantastic. As I mentioned, it's a web-based tool and there are apps available for all devices. Case Ideas I have a few use case ideas for you. Flipgrid is great for simple Q and A formative assessment type activity. You could use a Flipgrid for feedback on an event, like a CPD event, get staff to record videos of their feedback on the event. I, personally, have used Flipgrid for a group research project lately, and the forced brevity, you're only allowed, I think, 90 seconds for your video on the free version. That forced brevity really helped my learners, working on their ability to summarize lots of information. How Much Does it Cost? So, that's Flipgrid. Let me talk to you about pricing. It's free for learners, but there is a premium option and that is $65 a year, and as with Padlet, the premium option just gives you a few extra features. I haven't invested in the premium option yet, but it might be something I do in the future, I'm not sure. Watch this space.  Wrap Up Those are my two tools, my two ed tech tools that I'd like you to think about giving a try this week or next week. That's Padlet and Flipgrid. If you aren't already subscribed to the show, you might want to know that every fortnight I send an email to my email subscribers and I let them know that episodes are live. I also share lots of other interesting bits and bobs. So, it's worth being on my email list if you're not already. You can find the signup form at theteachingspace.com/vip.  It's time to sign off. Thanks so much for joining me. I hope you'll tune in to my next episode.

Episode 14 of The Teaching Space Podcast explores the Power of Journaling for Teachers. Podcast Episode 14 Transcript Welcome to the Teaching Space Podcast, coming to you from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Hello and welcome to Episode 14 of The Teaching Space Podcast. It's Martine here, thank you so much for joining me. Today's episode is all about The Power of Journaling for Teachers. Well, I say for teachers, this podcast is aimed at teachers and trainers so there is going to definitely be a teaching training angle to the show. However, what I've learned over the past month or so is that journaling is very good for all aspects of your life and career. So, while there is going to be a bit of teaching stuff, I'm also going to talk about journaling in a more general sense. Let's get started then. What is Journaling? I found a really good definition, on a website called lonerwolf.com and I'm going to read that out to you because I think it explains the process really well: "Journaling is the practice of writing down your thoughts, and feelings, for the purpose of self-analysis, self-discovery and self-reflection. As one of the oldest forms of self-help in the world, journaling is about exploring one's own thoughts, feelings, impulses, memories, goals and hidden desires through the written word. As such, journaling is often prescribed by therapists, counsellors and spiritual mentors as a powerful way of developing more self understanding and compassion." How Journaling Helped Me Well crikey, that sounds a little bit woo-woo, doesn't it? All this talk of feelings and self discovery, I have to be honest, it's not really my bag. But, I love to write and lately I have fallen off the wagon a little, with my daily writing schedule. Many of you will know I'm currently writing a book, and I've been struggling to work on it on a daily basis. It occurred to me that if I could get a daily writing habit back by keeping a journal then maybe that would help my writing towards my book. And, I've been journaling for just over a month now and, funnily enough, my writing habit has returned. Not only am I journaling daily, but I'm also working on my book daily. For me, journaling has already proven its power, in terms of getting me back to writing my book. How Can it Help You? But what about you, fellow teacher friend? Why is journaling a powerful tool for teachers? Sadly, my teaching colleagues are some of the most stressed people I know. Our workloads are enormous and they're currently growing as budgets are cut more and more tasks are being handed to teachers, usually for no extra pay. And, it's making achieving a work-life balance even more difficult. Keeping a journal is a good way to reflect on, and analyse, how you're spending your time. And, it's also a great place to log the activities you do for yourself, for your mental health, for your physical health, all of those sorts of things. This is one of the ways I think journaling can be powerful for teachers because you get a real reality check on how you're spending your day, and how much stuff you do just for you that's not work-related. The other thing it's great for is reflecting on your teaching practice and noting things that have worked well. You can also note things that simply haven't worked and ended up being a complete waste of time. Therefore you don't need to repeat them. And, ultimately, that is going to save you time. These are just a few reasons why journaling is incredibly powerful for teachers, but how do you do it?  How to Keep a Journal Are pen and paper okay? The answer is yes, of course, you have to journal using a format that works for you and, if you're the sort of person who loves stationery, I totally get it, grab yourself the nicest notebook or journal you can afford, get a really great pen and just start. I'm a tech girl, so pen and paper weren't going to cut it for me. I have been using Day One app for my journaling and I love it. I have to be honest; if I hadn't found this app, I wonder if I would have stuck at the journaling thing. It just makes journaling such a pleasure. Let me tell you about what I am journaling about, using Day One app. The first thing about the app that I love is you can have multiple journals, so I've set up four. One's for my business, one's creative, one is personal and one is teaching. You can view the contents of all four journals all at once, or you can view them separately. And you can also tag every entry. This is a huge benefit of journaling electronically as opposed to using pen and paper. The sort of things I write in my four journals include, what I'm doing creatively speaking, usually my creative practice is my downtime and it's not necessarily related to my teaching. So, this might be photos, or updates on projects that I'm working on.  I note food-related stuff such as recipes I've tried and enjoyed and also a wine that I like and want to buy again. This is usually accompanied by a photograph of the wine label. I make a note of my yoga practice. And, on the business side of things, I write about various achievements within my business, it might be sales, it might be events I'm going to attend. All sorts of things like that. On the relaxation side of things, it's a case of noting perhaps, TV series' I want to watch, or things I've enjoyed, or books I want to read. You can journal about anything you like; there are no rules here. Just journal about what you want. On the teaching side of things, mainly I journal about things that have gone well in sessions, but also areas for development and things I want to try. Benefits of the Day One App I've not done it yet, but I will be writing about things I want to read, research I'm interested in, articles that I might need to refer back to at a later date, that sort of thing. As I said, there are many benefits to using Day One app for your journal. One of the greatest things, apart from the tagging and the multiple journals, is that it's across platform app. So there is an app for your computer, I can use it on my iPad, on my phone. That makes it really user-friendly for me. Day One app is free; you get basic functions for nothing. But I've opted to go for the premium, which is 35 dollars a year, so it's a subscription model. And I get some extra functionality for that, which is ... it's worth paying for, for me. Why Not Give It A Try... Those are just a few of my thoughts on the Power of Journaling for Teachers, trainers and for anyone, really. Believe me when I say I never thought I would be extolling the virtues of journaling to anyone, let alone recording a podcast about it. I've really surprised myself. If you're a bit like me and you've always thought, journaling is a bit woo-woo, it's not for you, why don't you be open-minded? Why don't you give it a try? I'd say you need to do at least a couple of weeks or a month, to work out if it's for you or not. Wrap Up That's today's episode folks before I go, I want to remind you that the Teaching Space Staff Room is a free Facebook group and we'd love to have you in there to start a little bit of conversation. Perhaps we can talk journaling. Also, if you've enjoyed the episode, please consider leaving a positive iTunes review as it helps more people find the podcast and hopefully enjoy it too. Thanks for tuning in, I hope you'll tune in next time.

Episode 13 of The Teaching Space Podcast is an interview with Elizabeth Hutchinson from the Schools' Library Service in Guernsey. Podcast Episode 13 Transcript Welcome to The Teaching Space podcast, coming to you from Guernsey in the Channel Islands.  Hello, and welcome to Episode 13 of The Teaching Space Podcast. It's Martine here, thank you so much for joining me. In today's episode, I'm interviewing Elizabeth Hutchinson from the Schools' Library Service in Guernsey.  Martine: Welcome, Elizabeth. Elizabeth: Hello there, nice to be here. Martine: Lovely to have you here. Rather than me do the introductions, I'm going to kick off with a question to you. Who are you and what do you do? Elizabeth: Okay. I'm Head of the Schools' Library Service in Guernsey. I'm a librarian, and I support the school libraries across the Bailiwick of Guernsey. We look after and support all primary schools, all secondary schools, and we even fly across to Alderney to support them too. Martine: Fantastic. It's a busy job then, by the sounds of things. Elizabeth: It is. I've got a nice little team, which is good. We sort of share the schools between us. We each allocate, I allocate schools to individual librarians so that schools expect to see the same person most of the time. Of course we're sharing across our resources too, so it's a bit of an unusual role for us to play because it's a support service that we offer, but we work very closely with schools and teachers, which is our aim really. Martine: What do people think the role of the school librarian is, and what is it really? Two questions in one there. Elizabeth: Okay, well our service is slightly different, we are providing the professional school librarian role. Throughout the years that I've worked at Schools' Library Service, there is a very clear misconception on what a school librarian does. There are two people that you would see within a school library, one is a library assistant whose job is to issue the books and look after the day to day running of the school library. The other one is the professional school librarian, and their role is very different from what most people think a librarian does. Our role as a school librarian is just to work alongside the teachers and the curriculum. Our role is to support information literacy, which is the ability for anyone to find access, evaluate, give credit, and use good quality information. We provide resources and support in accessing those resources. There are the book loans from the Schools' Library Service that you can get from your own school library, but there's also the online resources. Our role is to support the students in using those effectively. What we find is that students are very good at doing that Google search, that question into Google and hoping that the answer's going to pop out. As you progress through your academic schooling you need to be using better quality academic resources or be very highly skilled in evaluating the resources that you're finding. We work with them to make sure that they understand a keyword search, that they understand that in any academic source you cannot type a question, that you have to think about what you're looking for, and actually how you tweak those keywords to actually find what you need. The more students look online for information, the less skilled they get at actually finding what they really need. That's where we're sort of, our main aim at the moment is, is to support that. Is that the new Guernsey curriculum has changed incredibly recently to look at the skillset. This is what school librarians have always done, the skill of research. We are now in a brilliant position to be able to go, well the skills that we have are the skills that we can teach your students, and what you've highlighted that you need at the moment. It's interesting times for a school librarian I think. Martine: It strikes me that the role of the school librarian has changed dramatically over the past sort of 20 years or so, but ultimately as you said, it comes down to research and helping students learn how to research properly. I guess it's not the sort of fundamentals of the role that's changed, it's where you're looking for the information has changed a little bit perhaps. Elizabeth: Oh absolutely. If you think about when we were back at school. Our research was probably the school library, but it was books. You could always copy and paste, but you'd actually have to hand write it. The chances of you being caught for doing that was quite unlikely unless the teacher was probably going down to the library to check the books that you were copying from. We live in a world now where information is really freely available and really easy to access. It's even easier to plagiarise but even easier to get caught. It's those skills, that skillset that has suddenly become very usable and shareable and people want them. It's a much wider world out there, and actually far more opportunities. Our skillset has had to adapt and change, but it has in a very exciting way, opened doors that I couldn't have imagined at the beginning of my career. Martine: It's a good time to be a school librarian, is what you're saying? Elizabeth: Absolutely, really exciting. Do you know, just the opportunity to share ideas on social media, talk to experts in our profession in a way that was just not possible before, has up-skilled all of us in a way that just wasn't possible. Having a personal learning network on social media has not only helped me to understand my role a bit more, but also helped me learn about things that I can then share with the students that I teach and the teachers that I work with. The worlds of research has really opened up in the last sort of few years and it is exciting times, yeah. I love it. Martine: It's really interesting to hear you talking about social media in that way as well, because I'm in huge agreement with you there, in that I get a massive amount of my CPD directly from Twitter because of all the links people share, and the Twitter chats that go on, and things like that. Technology is really exciting right now and it's great to hear about how the role of the school librarian has adapted to accommodate. Elizabeth: I think as well is that as part of learning and teaching research, I think it's important that we do include these technologies or these tools, because like you said, I too get a lot of my professional development from Twitter, but it's that digital literacy that is also around in school today that we're teaching. Actually if we can help students navigate resources like Twitter within the classroom, it then becomes less of a problem outside. Martine: Definitely. Elizabeth: So instead of us shying away from it, we need to be confident in using it ourselves as teachers to be able to then help the students navigate it. I think I was talking to somebody recently about the negativity, and the bullying, and the trolling that goes on, but actually if we had more people on social media that were brave enough to say, "Hey, that's not a nice thing to say." We drowned out the negatives with the positive then it would be a much better place to be. You can only learn those skills through usage. Actually, if we can learn to use it in a safer environment within the classroom then it would stand the students in better stead for the future I think. Martine: I'm in complete agreement with what you just said, and it almost leads onto a discussion about a topic I want to cover in a future podcast episode, which is this misconception that young people today are digital natives. Everyone seems to think, particularly amongst certain teachers I come across, that the kids today, they all know how to do anything online and they're very comfortable with technology. Yes, in terms of navigating an iPhone or some sort of smartphone, they can do that very easily, but they aren't particularly savvy when it comes to social media, and using technology and social media and things like that professionally. It's all about social. Is that something you've come across in your role at all? Elizabeth: Oh yeah, without a doubt. You know? Even to the extent of just good research, there's a lack of understanding amongst teachers that it is important that they check where their sources are coming from. The only way that that can happen is if we encourage teachers to insist on referencing. I know it sounds boring, do you know? I've had one teacher tell me that it stops the flow of the essay or the research - Martine: Really? Elizabeth: It spoils it, you know? For the understanding that actually where your information is coming from is important to the teacher makes the child then understand the importance for themselves. Once you learn how to reference, it doesn't take that long. If you collect your references as you go through, it is part and parcel of academic writing. Whether you like it or not, that's what we're doing at school, we are writing academically. Even the youngest of students, none of them are generally writing for pleasure. You can create the opportunity to write for pleasure alongside doing the research correctly and it should all just flow into it. You find that international baccalaureate students generally tend to be really good at their referencing because it's an essential part of the course. Teachers who teach GCSE and A Level, it's not. A lot of these students are spoon fed, and I get it, I do understand. Teachers are in a very difficult position that they are judged by their outcomes and teaching to the test and all of this, I get it. I do. But we're not doing our children any favours if we are not helping them to take responsibility for where their information's coming from. We talk about recently the fake news and you live in an internet bubble. I find that really interesting, it's something that I'm particularly interested in myself is that we go back to the social media question, is that we tend to follow the people who have the same ideas as us, share the same views, and reinforce what we believe to be true. That's a really dangerous position to put yourself into, that it's safe because you're not going to read anything that you disagree with, but actually, if we don't teach and encourage our students to actually look beyond that immediate understanding to get a more rounded view, then we are going to ... We're in a very scary position where we can be manipulated into believing that this is the only way for the world to work, or this religion is right, or that political party is correct. Actually, you can only get a full view of the world if you actually understand how you can actually access other sources of information that are going to give you a slightly different view. I find it, that to prevent students or not encourage students to actually go beyond that question into Google, we're opening a huge chasm that we might not ever be able to shut. Actually now is the time to take responsibility and start saying, "This is a serious situation and we as teachers and educators need to actually do something about it when we can," and we can do something about it, you know? Teach them to reference, understand plagiarism, understand the fact that you need to give credit for somebody else's work. All of this is about looking at how we behave online and how we gather our information for our own learning. It has to come and start in a school setting. Martine: The idea of living in an internet bubble, as you described it, is just absolutely terrifying. I mean if you don't ever have to challenge what you see, what you read, what you hear, how are you ever going to learn? It's very, very worrying. Elizabeth: Yeah, it is interesting because I think people forget. I think if you don't live in an information world where you're teaching people to find information, I think it's very easy to forget that ... I think we've had recently, sort of Facebook have tried to change it, but where they were feeding you the things that you want to find rather than what you chose to find. I think you need to be a little bit savvy about ... Or understanding that that is actually what goes on. Martine: Definitely. What you said about referencing and how if you do it as you go along, it's not difficult, that is so true. I'm a Google Certified Trainer, and so I use Google Docs for most academic writing activities with my learners, and it is so easy to reference in Google Docs. It really is straightforward. I shared a video on social a couple of days ago that showed how to do it in about 90 seconds. It was a demonstration that took that long, you know? It is easy, simple and straightforward. As long as you know how to do it, then I don't really understand why people wouldn't be doing it, particularly in Google Docs. Elizabeth: Well exactly. If you are a person who uses Word, there's a referencing tab in Word, which is equally as quick, do you know? When you think back to the dissertations we used to write and you'd spend three or four days putting in your references, literally if you're collecting them as you go along, it's a less than 10-second job to create your bibliography. Why would you not use that, you know? Martine: Exactly. Elizabeth: It is so simple these days. Martine: Talking about things being speedy, how can your school librarian save you time? This is a question on behalf of the teachers, how can your school librarian save you time? Elizabeth: That's an interesting question because I had a discussion with somebody the other day and the things that I thought teachers would understand was time-saving. Turns out to be not so. Martine: Right. Elizabeth H.: Let me explain. Schools' Library Service provides what we call project loans. Teachers can email us and say, "I'm doing Victorians next term with my year six students. I have three or four higher learners and I have about two that will need lower level books." We put together a nice little box, we deliver it to the school, which then lands in their library and they go and collect it and they start using it. That is time-saving. Martine: Yes, I would think so, yeah. Elizabeth: If you are a teacher who sends an email ... So this is what was pointed out to me, if you are a teacher that sends an email once a term and this box magically appears, you forget that actually, it takes time to curate those resources and put what you need into a box and issue it and get it out to you. There is a little bit of lack of understanding of what you are getting on the basic level from a school library, you know? Martine: Okay, yeah. Elizabeth: Obviously we're talking about the fact that we're Schools' Library Service and we have a centralized collection. If your school library itself has the resources that you need you could just ask your school librarian to do the same thing. I understand that there are people probably listening to your podcast that don't have a Schools' Library Service or do have a librarian in their library but had not ever thought to have that conversation. So please do. If you want resources for your classroom, then start with your school librarian or contact your Schools' Library Service and books will magically appear and save you time, because then you don't have to go and look for them. Martine: Which is fabulous. Elizabeth: It is. Other time-saving initiatives that we've looked at and started doing recently is helping teachers and classes connect with other students in classes across the world. The Guernsey curriculum is all about outside, and we're learning outside the classroom, and learning from experts beyond the walls of your classroom. A lot of teachers don't have time to find those connections and those collaborations, and it is one of the things that Schools' Library Service has worked hard at, at building up our contacts and opening the doors of the classroom. For instance, in the last few years, we have connected our students with students in India who were doing an Indian topic. They were able to talk to and ask questions of Indian students who are the same age as them. They were able to share the information about what Guernsey is like to those same students. It sort of puts a different perspective on what creating a good question looks like. For me as a librarian, my role is not only to connect these students, but it's also to make sure that the skillset is right, so going back to that information literacy role for this particular Indian collaboration we made sure that the children understood what made a good question. Them being able to ask those questions directly to somebody else changes your understanding of what makes a good question. What we found interesting was that some of the questions weren't so good and they got a very poor response or a poor answer. Actually, as the session went on you could see the children were changing the questions as they carried on. Their questioning got better, so it's about learning real ... What is it called? Real-world learning, and it does make a difference. Martine: What a fantastic learning experience for them. I bet there'll remember that for the rest of their lives, that session where they talked to kids in India. I mean that's great. Elizabeth: Yeah, and it's learning on all sorts of different levels. We had a class locally talking to experts on African penguins, and they were taken around a nature reserve via Skype. It was, again, so different from that experience of reading the information from a book or online, you know? We save teachers' time by creating and generating these connections and collaborations, and enabling them to have innovative lessons in a way that they wouldn't have done before, you know? I think for me our role has changed, you wouldn't automatically think that a school librarian is about collaboration, but anybody that you collaborate with is a learning opportunity, and librarians are about learning and finding information. If finding information is found via a person, then that's just as good as finding it in a book or online, do you know? It's all-encompassing. Martine: That's fantastic. I'm really starting to get a feel for how that role has developed. I'm certainly sensing from you the passion you have for sharing your experience of it. I'm also getting a real technology vibe from you too. I work very closely with our librarian at the College of Further Education and she's very, very tech savvy, and that's what we work closely on, technology for learning. I've always been amazed at how if you go for the kind of old, as we've identified, misconception of the school librarian ... I mean our librarian, Rachel, is the exact opposite of that. She's really techy, and she's always looking for the latest innovation to enhance learning. I've always been really impressed with that. I mean clearly with what you've been describing, you're a massive advocate for technology for learning as well, but how else do you work with teachers to enhance their understanding of technology for learning and sort of bring new tools to them and things like that? How do you work with teachers in that way? Elizabeth: Our big aim over the last couple of years is to make sure that we understand the tools because unless you understand the tools you can't then help and support teachers to use them. Through our connections online, so usually via Twitter, we have been listening and hearing about what other librarians have been using with their teachers. The latest tools that we have really used widely across the schools is Padlet and Flipgrid. Martine: I love both of those. Elizabeth: Just really useful tools. It's not about how the tool can engage the learner, it's about how it can enhance the teaching. The two together work well in partnership. It's not about providing a piece of innovation or tool that ticks the box that you've actually used technology, it's about how it's going to enhance your learning. Martine: Absolutely, I couldn't agree more. Elizabeth: For one example, we run book groups in our schools, so the librarian goes along, sometimes it's part of a lesson, other times it's a book group that is run at a lunchtime. Usually what we try and do is get them to read the same book so that then there's a book discussion. I've got two examples of Padlet enhancing what we were doing, one in primary and one in secondary. In the primary setting we had an author visiting, so Caroline Lawrence, she writes The Roman Mysteries. She had come as one of our Book Week authors last year. Our book group then decided that they were going to read one of her books and I then approached her, because she had been here, to say, "Do you know our students are reading your book, would you mind talking to them about it?" After a bit of a discussion and agreement that she would, we decided that we were going to use Padlet as our platform. Now Padlet is, for those of you that don't know, is like a post-it board online. Basically, you click a plus button and you can add a comment. It also allows other people to comment on your post-it. What we'd agreed with this book ground was that we were going to write questions for Caroline and look back the next week and see what she responded. I happened to manage to get in touch with Caroline just on the day that we were going to be doing the Padlet and told her what time we were going to be on and sent her the link. She appeared during that Padlet session. Martine: That's so cool. Elizabeth: The students were typing the questions and she was responding real time. Martine: I love it. Well, you cannot imagine the excitement of these students. You know, we sometimes worry, don't we, that if you allow something to happen live, we're at risk of students being silly or something going badly wrong, but I do believe genuinely that if you give students the opportunity and you've talked to them about the fact that you're going online and everybody could see, they genuinely behave in a way that is suitable. It's a brilliant learning, there were some amazing questions from that Padlet that we couldn't have got had she not answered real time, because one question led to another, to another. She was brilliant, she responded to as many of those questions as she could. Initially, we had lots of, "You're here. Ooh, exciting." You know? That is part and parcel of expressing how you're feeling about it, not something that's bad because you've been set a task to ask a question. It's about monitoring it and allowing it to happen naturally. Martine: It's just so memorable, like the example earlier with the Indian students, those students will remember that forever. Elizabeth: Of course they will. Of course, they will. Martine: So good. Elizabeth: They have come back and they've wanted to read more Caroline Lawrence books. The impact of that session was not just the fact that they ended up creating brilliant questions, but they were also engaged enough to sort want to continue and read more, and that's what it's all about, reading for pleasure. Okay, so the second example is a book called Wonder that has had international acclaim over the last few months and has actually been made into a book. For those of you that don't know, it's a story about a little boy who has severe facial disfigurements and it's written from several perspectives throughout the book, so it's written from his own perspective, his sister's, his friend's. It's about bullying, friendship, it's about understanding, empathy. It's gone down really well across the schools. We had planned to read the book with our book group in one of our secondary schools. I have a librarian friend who lives in Arkansaw. He is a librarian in a secondary school, so I said that we were going to read this book, did he fancy running a book club on Padlet. We agreed that this would be good, we set up the Padlet, the students themselves discussed the book across Padlet. When I look at the understanding that these children had and their shared ideas, and the variation of voices, it just gives me a tingle when I look at it, you know? We've got children from Nebraska, we've got children from Arkansaw, we've got children from Guernsey all talking about understanding and the importance of empathy. It doesn't matter whether you're from America or from England, those messages are all the same and show the students how people aren't any different. There may be different cultures and different ways of living, but actually, our friendships and our understanding of each other is all very similar. If that's what sharing an online book group is all about, then let's do more of it. Martine: Absolutely. I mean that's just such a great example of how technology for learning is so much more than simply getting learners engaged. I think a lot of people think, like you said, "Oh, we've got to tick a box, we've got to use technology. We've been told we have to." That's kind of one level that I think some people go to. Then the next level is, "Oh well, you know they're always on their phone, so let's use them in sessions and that will engage them." But it is so much more than that. Elizabeth: It is, yeah. Martine: That's exactly what you've just described. I love Flipgrid by the way. Elizabeth: Yeah, me too. Martine: I used it with my adult learners quite recently, because I teach our initial teacher training program at the College of Further Education, and we have one little bit of research that we have to do that isn't terribly exciting, they have to research a couple of different pieces of legislation that affect the role of the teacher. It's really not that exciting. Normally I get them to do it, a written approach to it and so on. This time I allocated the laws and codes of practice and regulations out to various members of the group and I sent them away to do their research. Of course, they noted their sources, so very important. Elizabeth: Good, good. Martine: Essential, as one of them was doing the copyright law so ... So yeah, they went away and they researched and they recorded a 90-second summary video on our Flipgrid sharing what they'd found out. It was so good, it went so well. Normally when they come to do that part of the assignment when they do it on their own, it's very challenging for them because it's just not the exciting subject that they want to be writing about, they want to be writing about the fun stuff of teaching. They did such a great job of it and it was because of the Flipgrid approach to research that we did. They were all quite nervous about using it, interestingly. Elizabeth: Yeah, people don't like having themselves videoed do they? Martine: No. Elizabeth: Actually, that is a skill in itself. Martine: Oh yes. Elizabeth: Condensing what you want to say in 90 seconds. Martine: Exactly. Elizabeth: It's a bit like learning on Twitter, that you have to say it in 140 characters, although I think it's a bit more now isn't it? Martine: It's 280 now I think. Elizabeth: 280, yeah. Actually, those are interesting skills in themselves. If you are anything like me, I'm a bit of a waffler when I write, and actually being made to restrict myself means that you learn to make sure you take the important bits rather than the bits that aren't important. That's where it does help. We also used Flipgrid to, again, talk about ... Again, it was, Wonder was a great book for us. The students in America asked the students in Guernsey what five words could they use to describe the book. We got lots of videos where the students are literally sitting in front of the camera giving five words. The work that's gone into that is far more than those 25 seconds that it takes them to say the words because they've actually had to think about which five words they wanted to choose, and why they were important, and how that was going to sound when they recorded it. They worked really hard at finding those five words. If we had set them a topic where we had just asked them and they were just going to write them down, I don't think you would've got the same engagement, but because they were going to share those with the world, they were then very careful about which five they chose, you know? It does add that extra element, it does add the audience that the children don't have in a school setting very often. Martine: I think for Guernsey students this becomes particularly important because we are living on a very small island and our community isn't as multicultural as perhaps we would like it to be, so students aren't exposed to perhaps as much diversity as students in other parts of the world would be exposed to. By opening the world up to them via technology or social media or whatever, I think it can do nothing but add value. Elizabeth: I've got another example that I'd love to share is that we do a lot of Google Hangouts. There's a thing called Mystery Hangouts where the librarians work together to find a school that would like to connect. You then organise it with the teachers. The teachers know where the other school is, but the students aren't told. The game is that they have to ... They can only ask questions that have a yes or a no answer, and they have to find the other school before they are found. Martine: I love it. Elizabeth: We ran this with Saint Anne's in Alderney, a year 10 group. It was all very exciting. Just to put it in perspective, normally when I used to go to Saint Anne's as the school librarian, I was the school librarian, nobody took any notice of me whatsoever as I walked down the corridors. I went in, I did my job, I worked with the teachers. It was all very similar to what it normally was. This day that I arrived in Alderney there was a buzz about the school, the whole school had heard that this game was going to take place. Everybody wanted to know what was going on. I was a little bit scared because it was actually our first attempt and wasn't sure that everything was going to work, but it thankfully worked beautifully. The game itself gave them good communication skills, it gave them research skills because they had to look at maps and atlases, and think about the questions that they were asking. The big deal for me from that one session was at the end where they were asked to share some information about where they lived, and the American students were very used to doing this kind of thing. They've never done it internationally before, but they'd obviously done Mystery Hangouts with other states in the US. These students had written lists of information about where they lived. We hadn't prepared our students that way. I did worry at that moment where there were lots of arms crossing and there's nothing to tell you about Alderney here. I thought, "Oh dear," you know? "This is where it all falls flat." Until one American student asked the Alderney students what they did after school. Their response was very negative, but it was, "We just go to the beach." They were the perfect words because again it was Arkansaw, they are 13 hours away from any beach. Martine: Oh wow. Elizabeth: They were just so amazed that Alderney students had a beach on their doorstep. The opportunity to pick up the laptop and take the laptop to the window and show the Arkansaw students the beach just suddenly made the Alderney students understand that they had a place in the world. Understand that they had something worth sharing. Martine: And how lucky they are to live in such a beautiful place. Elizabeth: Absolutely. Absolutely. It was a pivotal moment in my understanding of why we do what we do. Martine: Wow. Elizabeth: If I do nothing else in my career, it was a turning point, it was this is why this is so important. We live on a small island, you're right, Alderney is even smaller, but there are children who live in villages, there are children who live in cities, and actually seeing how other children live and it's a way of learning, it has huge potential, doesn't it? It is just an opportunity for us to open the world to them without them having to leave their classrooms, and to share their understanding of their place in the world is something that's really important. The more I can do with that the better as far as I'm concerned. Martine: Brilliant. The working title for this episode and I think I've just decided I'm going to stick with it, is Why It's Time to Get to Know Your School Librarian, and there it is. That's why it's time to get to know your school librarian because your school librarian can help you make amazing learning happen. Thank you, Elizabeth for sharing all of the things you've shared in this episode. That's been fab. Where can people find you online? Elizabeth: Schools' Library Service, Guernsey Schools' Library Service Blog Elizabeth on Twitter Elizabeth's blog Martine: Thank you so much, Elizabeth, that was excellent. You are welcome back on the show anytime. Elizabeth: Thank you, I really enjoyed it.

Episode 12 of The Teaching Space Podcast explores the Pomodoro Technique and why it is the perfect productivity tool for teachers. Podcast Episode 12 Transcript Welcome to The Teaching Space podcast, coming to you from Guernsey in the Channel Islands.  Hello, and welcome to Episode 12 of The Teaching Space Podcast. It's Martine here, thank you so much for joining me. In today's episode, I'm going to talk to you about why I believe the Pomodoro Technique is the perfect productivity tool for teachers. What is the Pomodoro Technique? If you've not come across the Pomodoro Technique before, it is a time management method developed by a chap called Francesco Cirillo in the late 80s. The technique involves using a timer to break work down into intervals. And traditionally, those intervals are 25 minutes in length, and a 25-minute chunk of work is called a Pomodoro. Why Pomodoro? It's called a Pomodoro because Mr. Cirillo used to use a kitchen timer that was shaped like a tomato, and I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, pomodoro is Italian for the word tomato. Now, I'm going to have to double check that on Google. One second. Phew. According to Google, I am indeed correct. That is why the Pomodoro technique is named as such. How Does it Work? You're chunking up work into 25-minute slots and after you've done your 25 minutes of work, you have a five-minute break. Just to outline really clearly how the Pomodoro technique works: You select a task that you need to complete, then you work out how many Pomodoros you're going to need in order to complete that task. Personally, I class the Pomodoro as 30 minutes because five minutes of that is your break. Say you've got a job that's going to take an hour and a half, that means you're going to need three Pomodoros. What you do is you set your kitchen timer or your timer on your mobile device for 25 minutes and then for 25 minutes you work uninterrupted, 100% focused on the task in hand. When your alarm goes, you then take a five-minute break. Your five-minute break is best spent doing something very different to the task in hand. For example, if you're doing computer-based work, spend five minutes getting a breath of fresh air or moving away from your computer to get a cup of coffee or something along those lines. Put the timer on for the five minutes, though, because that five-minute slot needs to be managed with the same care as the 25-minute slot. Then it's a case of rinse and repeat. For every four Pomodoros you do, you should take a slightly longer break. It's recommended that you take, say, 20 or 30 minutes after you've done four Pomodoros, which is two hours work. Timers As I mentioned, this method was invented in the 80s where we didn't use smartphones, so Francesco Cirillo used a kitchen timer. A simple kitchen timer. And, of course, you can perform the Pomodoro technique in exactly the same way. Personally, I tend to use the alarm on my mobile device. There are a number of apps that are set up for use with the Pomodoro technique and a very, very quick search for Pomodoro on the iOS app store comes up with a load. There is Focus Keeper, which is a free app that I've used and it's really good. Be Focused, rel="noopener" data-cke-saved-href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/workflow-timer/id733300214?mt=8">Workflow Timer and a number of other options. Flat Tomato is not one I've tried, but I rather like the name of it. There are a variety of apps that can help you utilize the Pomodoro technique. Perfect for Teachers Why am I telling you that the Pomodoro technique is a great productivity tool? In fact, the perfect productivity tool for teachers? Good question. I think one of the biggest shocks for me moving from private sector to public sector and working as a teacher was working to a timetable. I haven't worked to a timetable since being at school. It was quite overwhelming initially. I really enjoyed the structure of it, but what I found very, very challenging was the fact that non-contact time seemed to be very short, snatched moments of time between lessons, and because of that day structure, because teachers often don't have long stretches of time to do focused work, the Pomodoro technique works brilliantly for us. When you work in short bursts and they are timed, you get into a state of flow much more quickly. You train yourself to get in the zone, and you are less inclined to be distracted. The Pomodoro technique makes you focus more, and for that reason alone I think it can revolutionise the way teachers deal with their non-contact times, so the time that they are not in the classroom. Your task might be marking, it might be preparation, anything like that. If you break it into Pomodoros and you do that really focused work, you'll get into flow more quickly and you will ultimately get more done. Parkinson's Law Parkinson's Law suggests that activities will expand to fill the time allotted to them. Meetings are an amazing example. If you set an hour for a meeting, it's going to take an hour, even if you only needed 20 minutes for that meeting. By using small chunks of time, 25-minute slots, you get to be more in control of the time it takes to complete a task. And the other thing you end up doing is more accurately estimating how long something is going to take you. If you have a pile of assignments to mark, you have a really good look at that pile, and you get better and better at estimating how long that's going to take. I really believe that Pomodoro technique is the ideal productivity tool for teachers. Why don't you give it a go? I'd love it if you let me know how you're getting on or perhaps you use the technique already, perhaps you're already Pomodoroing. I don't think that's even a thing, but let's go with it. Do let me know, I'd love to hear from you. The Teaching Space Staff Room The best way to chat about productivity tips for teachers is to join my Facebook group, The Teaching Space Staff Room. Wrap Up Okay, that's all from me today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please consider leaving a positive iTunes review for the podcast, because that way the show can be found by more people and I'd really love that. I'd like to speak to as many teachers and people working in education as possible. Thanks for listening, and I hope you'll join me next time.

Episode 11 of The Teaching Space Podcast explores Covey's circle of influence and circle of concern. Podcast Episode 11 Transcript Welcome to The Teaching Space podcast, coming to you from Guernsey in the Channel Islands.  Today we're going to be talking about understanding your circle of influence and circle of concern. This concept comes from Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Seven Habits of Highly Effective People I'm not one of these people who stands by absolutely everything in that book, but there is one thing that I find myself using in my teaching role all the time, and it's having an awareness of my circle of influence and circle of concern.  That's why I thought it would be a really good topic to cover in isolation for an episode. Having an awareness of my circles is really helpful for working out where to focus my effort and energy. It allows me to prioritise effectively. For those of you who've not come across the circle of influence and circle of concern, let me explain what they mean. Circle of Influence, Circle of Concern It would be far easier if I had a video podcast because I would have a flip chart at this point and be drawing circles on them, so please just use your imagination for now.  Circle of Concern Your circle of concern is a big circle that contains everything you are worried or concerned about at the moment. It could be a couple of learners in your group, your class. It could be something health-related. You may be worried about your finances or the finances of a member of your family. You might be concerned about the environment or something political going on right now. Anything that you're concerned about goes into your circle of concern. Circle of Influence Your circle of influence contains some of those things from your circle of concern because it's all the things you are worried about that you can actually change. It the things you can influence; the problems you can do something about.  Your circle of concern, generally speaking, is far bigger than your circle of influence. I imagine the circle of influence inside the circle of concern. Your circle of influence and circle of concern can dictate whether you are a proactive person or a reactive person. I suspect that most of us want to be proactive in our professional and personal lives. Proactive People Proactive people tend to focus on things in their circle of influence, things they can actually do something about. That's where their energy goes and as a result, they see success, and that success ultimately means that their circle of influence gets bigger. Reactive People Reactive people tend not to focus on things that are in their circle of influence. They look at things that are broader and in their circle of concern. In other words, things that they might not have the power to change. As a result, their circle of influence can shrink. Design Your Life The idea behind all of this really is that you design your own life and it's far better to focus your time and your energy on things that you can do something about. When you start dealing with young people in an educational environment you want to really make a difference. In many cases we do, but sometimes you need to make a decision where you focus your energy, and I think the circle of influence and circle of concern can be really helpful for working that out. It can also be really helpful when you're working out how to manage the enormous workload that we have as teachers. Motivation I think one of the reasons why the circle of influence and circle of concern thing works so well for me is that I'm very motivated by wins. I don't mean that I'm competitive. What I mean is that if I focus my time and energy on something and I am able to influence it and I get a result, a positive result, that motivates me to move onto something else and something else and something else. The reason why your circle of influence grows is in this situation is that the more wins you get, the more confident you get, and the more influential you will appear to people around you in your organisation. It's a really, really simple concept, but one which many, many people can relate to. Take Action Over the next week when you're dealing with prioritising, when you're dealing with difficult situations, think to yourself, "Is this in my circle of influence or my circle of concern?" And handle it accordingly. Time for a Quote? I wanted to sum up this episode with a profound thought-provoking quote. I've been looking around online and actually what I came up with, this kind of surprised me a little bit. I'm going to read a tiny bit of Reinhold Niebuhr's famous Serenity Prayer. Regardless of your religious persuasion, this isn't something that's going to happen regularly, by the way. I'm not going to read prayers on the podcast. It's just not how I roll. This really sums up the circle of influence and circle of concern. It goes something like this: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.  Isn't that fab? Wrap Up This has been a really short and sweet episode. I just wanted to introduce you to this fantastic theory from Stephen Covey and it is one that definitely, it plays a part in my day on a regular basis, and that's the reason I wanted to share it with you. That's all from me today. I hope you've enjoyed episode 11 of The Teaching Space podcast. If you have please consider hopping over to iTunes and leaving a positive review. By doing so, you make it far easier for teachers to find the podcast. If people are searching for an education podcast the more people who leave a positive review for The Teaching Space the more people who will find it, so please consider doing that. Thank you very much and I hope you'll tune in to the next episode.

Episode 10 of The Teaching Space Podcast shares 10 things you must do before, during and after an education conference. Podcast Episode 10 Transcript Introduction Hello and welcome to episode ten of the Teaching Space Podcast. It's Martine here. In today's episode, I want to share with you ten things you must do before, during and after attending an education conference. Bett Show 2018 These ten things are based on recent experience. In January, I attended the Bett Show, which takes place in London. And it's a large education technology show at the ExCel Centre. Now, I'm based in Guernsey, so the reality of attending a show at the ExCel Centre looks something like this: The Journey I take the red-eye flight, which is the seven a.m. flight from Guernsey to London Gatwick. We used to be able to fly directly to London City, which was a lot more convenient if you know London geography, but alas, that's not possible anymore. So I'm on the red-eye flight at seven a.m. I like to be at the airport an hour before, so I'm there at six a.m., which means I'm up at around five a.m., so that's not a great start to a travel day now really, is it? The flight thankfully got off on time, around seven a.m., so I got into London sometime after 8. By the time I got to the ExCel Centre, it was probably about half-past ten. This experience of travelling to London and going to Bett, made me start thinking about what I need to do slightly better when I go again. I have been to Bett a couple of times, but normally I go overnight. And on this occasion, I went for the day, so I was in on the first flight and out on the last flight, which must have been half seven, eight o'clock in the evening, maybe even a bit later actually. Next Year's Plan Next year I will definitely do an overnight stay, because going for a day, including my travel, just simply wasn't enough. The substance of this podcast really is the things I'm going do better next time, so ten things that I believe you should do in preparation for an education conference (and also a few things to do during and after). So here we go. 1. Make a Plan Look at who's going to be at the event you're going to and plan out your day or days. The Bett Show is brilliant because they have an app, which you can download, and you can favourite any of the stands or speakers that you want to see. So make a plan. And make a plan in advance of your trip. Don't do it on the flight or on the train. 2. Pre-Arrange Meetings While you're planning, arrange meetings, put them on your calendar. Now, this was a mistake I made for Bett; I arranged my meetings while I was there via Twitter direct message. The wifi at the Bett Show was appalling, so I ended up missing a couple of meeting, which I was really disappointed about. Arrange any meetings in advance, pop them in your calendar. 3. Pack All the Things When you're packing for the event, include your phone charger. If like me you are going to somewhere international (to me, the UK is international) you might need a data SIM card for internet.  At Bett, I was totally reliant on wifi, and the connection was terrible. It was the reason that I missed several meetings. Also, I wanted a live stream while I was there and I was unable to do that. I did it once or twice, but it was pretty poor, so if you need to take a sort of spare SIM card, or you know a battery pack or whatever it is you need to enable you to be digitally connected the whole time, make sure you pack that. And if you're gonna rock it old school: take some business cards too. 4. Get Social Is there a hashtag? Can you follow people who are going to be exhibiting at the event? Get some conversation going on social media, and you will have a richer experience at your event. 5. Target Yourself to Connect As part of your planning, target yourself with people that you want to connect with. This is a special shout out really for the introverts out there attending these type of events. When it comes to this sort of thing, I'm quite introverted, and I find the hugeness and the noise of an event like the Bett Show quite overwhelming. So this time I made a real point of targeting myself to visit certain stands and speak to certain people. And I achieved some of those targets. Not all of them, but I achieved some, so I recommend as number five you target yourself with certain things to do and certain people to see. 6. Get a Good Night's Sleep Get a good night's sleep before the event. These events are exhausting, especially if you have to do a great deal of travel to attend, so get a good night's sleep. Now we're talking about on the day. 7. Wear Comfortable Shoes and Clothes This is kind of a no-brainer, but I felt I had to put it on here: wear comfortable shoes and clothes. While I was walking around the Bett Show, I saw a lady who was wearing, I swear, five-inch heels and I was just like "How on earth can you be walking around wearing those shoes?" I have a pedometer on my watch, and I did close to 17,000 steps on that day. How could you do that in five-inch heels? Crazy stuff. 8. A 30-Minute Orientation  When you arrive at the show, and this is number eight, when you arrive at the show, give yourself a good half an hour or so just to get familiar with your surroundings. Finding a map is a good idea at this point as well, and comparing the map with your list of places you want to go and people you want to see. Do that within your first half an hour and adjust to where you are. 9. Eat Lunch at an Odd Time Number nine, this is going to sound like a really strange one, but go with me, eat lunch at a really odd time. Ideally, take snacks with you, so you can eat lunch late. And the reason I say this is at the Bett Show, the ExCel Centre was heaving. It was so busy, that it took me three-quarters of an hour to queue for a salad and that was around one o'clock. Now had I gone at 11 or half two, three o'clock, I think I would have been fine, but given that I had so little time there, that three-quarters of an hour that I spent queuing for my lunch, could have been spent doing far more interesting things. 10. Follow Up And finally, number ten, follow up any interesting conversations or meetings that you had while you were at the event. Give it a couple of days and then put an email in and carry the conversation on. This is something that I did post-Bett. I was trying to arrange a meeting while I was there on Twitter, thank you terrible wifi for ruining that, but I wanted to meet with an event organiser who does a variety of summits for Google. I was quite keen to try to get involved with this company and hopefully find a way to do some work with them. While I missed the meeting thanks to the terrible wifi and arranging it via Twitter, I followed up afterwards, and I'm really excited to say I am going to be speaking at the London Google Summit in March. So follow up any opportunities that crop up at the event that you're attending. I did that and something really exciting has come of it. Wrap Up So those are my top ten tips for things you should do in preparation for and while attending and indeed after attending an education conference. Of course, this goes for any type of conference that you're going to attend, but as my listeners are mainly teachers and people working in education, I focused on education conferences. I hope this has been useful. As I mentioned, Bett is an educational technology conference, and if ed tech is something of interest to you, then please check out my email course 30 EdTech Tools in 30 Days. Okay, that's all from me today, thank you so much for listening, and I hope you'll join me for episode 11.

Episode 9 of The Teaching Space podcast is an interview with ADHD expert Soli Lazarus.  Martine: Hello, it's Martine here. Welcome to the Teaching Space Podcast. Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Soli Lazarus. Now, rather than tell you all about Soli, I'm going to ask her to introduce herself. Soli, welcome to the show. Soli: Hello, Martine. Thank you so much for inviting me. It's lovely to be here today. Martine: It's great to have you here. Why don't you tell us a bit about yourself? Who are you and what do you do? Soli: Right. Yes, my name is Soli. I'm, at the moment, an assistant SENCO in a large primary school in London. I do that part-time. The rest of my time, I run my own consultancy, Yellow Sun. I support families with children with autism and ADHD. I support them on a one-to-one basis within a support group. We have a great Facebook group. I have an online training course and I've got so many other things in the pipeline. My head's buzzing with ideas. But I'm super, super passionate about particularly ADHD. Soli: My son has ADHD. He's nearly 30. As a parent, I really struggled to get support and help and it's very, very isolating as a parent with a child with any kind of difficulties. It's not the life you signed up for. It's sad. It can be lonely. You feel really isolated and don't know where to turn. This was my may name of Yellow Sun, is just really to empower parents and give support to parents and just give simple tweaks that can really change how a child feels about themselves. One of my plans, also, is to go into schools. Soli: We just need to get the word out there that if we change a little bit of a child with ADHD, change a bit of their environment and our reaction to a child, it can just make all the difference. I'm super passionate, super fired up. Yeah, that's me. Martine: That's fantastic. Actually, I think one of the best ways to make a difference in these types of areas is through education, isn't it? Ultimately, by educating people about what ADHD actually is and those small changes that you mentioned, then you can really make a difference. In the simplest of terms, what exactly is ADHD? Can you tell me? Soli: Yep. First of all, what it's not is bad parenting. It's a real condition. It's a biologically proven condition that is a chemical imbalance in the brain. It's real. That's not to say good parenting can make a difference. Similarly, bad parenting can make the situation worse. But it certainly does not cause ADHD. In a nutshell, we all know these children in our class because they're the one who is constantly fidgeting and on the move. Or they might be incredibly impulsive. They just do not have those brakes for them to stop before they think. They can be very inattentive unless it's something highly, highly motivating. The three aspects are inattention, impulsive, and hyperactive. Martine: Excellent. That really explains it well. Like you say, so many of us can relate to having these kids in our class or these kids in our lives generally. Personally, I teach adults. I can connect with that slightly less. Nevertheless, I do understand that ADHD is a very real thing in adults, as well. We'll touch on that in a minute. But even with children, I come into contact with through my family and things like that, it's quite easy to spot. Is it that a child will usually get a diagnosis of ADHD? What happens when a parent or a teacher suspects that a child might have ADHD? What, generally, is the process there? Soli: Well, that's a good question because it's quite a sticky point. There's no blood test. There are no scans, at the moment, to show this discrepancy in brain function. It's really just by observation and reports, reports from parents. Yes, it's all these behaviours that I've spoken about. Generally, I would say to parents, "If your child is behaving in that same way in whatever environment they're at, if when they're at Granny or if they're in an afterschool club or if you're shopping or at the cinema or a birthday party and at school and at home, if in all those different environments they're still more or less showing that same kind of behavior, then it's almost certainly something like ADHD." Soli: There are lots of other conditions that go alongside ADHD, such as dyslexia, sensory processing disorders. Sometimes there are other things going alongside. I'm of the mindset, though, I'm not really that bothered about a diagnosis. I'm more bothered about how we react to a behaviour. However, we label that behaviour, we have to do something about it. We have to change something up or react differently. Although I'm not saying don't get a diagnosis because that does help. It helps frame how we react. That child might even need medication. Some children really react very well being on a medication. Soli: My son, personally, was diagnosed by a great consultant. I think the way forward, if you really suspect or school really suspect that it could be ADHD, you do need to get some consultant to actually do the diagnosis. You need to go down the route of going to the GP and get referred to a consultant. Some children, yes, as I said, do react very well to being on medication. My son was diagnosed when he was eight and he was put on Ritalin. It was amazing. Ritalin is a very short-acting medication. It stays in the system for about three hours. He would take it and he would go from almost climbing the walls to then being very, I would say, subdued. Soli: But he actually said to me, and I will never, ever forget, he said, "My eyes are keeping still and I can now see the words." It meant that, at eight years old, he couldn't read. He started to read. He was able to focus on his work. But he hated the feeling. When he was 16, and it was actually the day before his first GCSE, he said, "I'm not taking it anymore." Soli: Obviously, there was nothing I could do about it 'cause he really hated it. But for some children and adults, I know medication really, really works. Actually, my son is 30 now and I do keep saying to him, "Please pop back to the doctor and just see if there's anything else. There might be other things now that all those years ago were not available." But it's not his thing. But I'm not saying it's not for everybody because there are some people, adults and children, who work really well with medication. But it goes alongside. Medication is not the answer. The most important thing is for us to change our reaction to a child and an adult and help them and support them so that their lives can be much calmer and happier. Martine: That's so interesting. What you're saying, from a teacher perspective, is that regardless of whether there is a diagnosis or not, if you spot these behaviors in your learners, regardless of the label that that child has been given, you can implement changes to make things better for them and generally make things better for the whole class. Soli: 100%. We'll probably talk about it a little later, the actual specifics of things that a teacher can do, but I can guarantee you do some of these strategies and it will help this child with ADHD, but it will also those other children who've got undiagnosed things or other learning difficulties or English is an additional language or a child who's had just a really bad, chaotic home life and can't focus. We've got all sorts of learners from all sorts of backgrounds, all sorts of things going on at home, that at any one time some children just need that extra little bit of something different just to help them. Martine: Brilliant. We hear a lot about ADHD in kids and, obviously, that's when if there is a diagnosis, that's when it will tend to happen. But what does ADHD look like in adults? You said your son is 30. If you want to use him as an example, you can. Personally, I teach mainly adults. Very rare I teach children. Selfishly, I'm quite interested in it from my own perspective. But hopefully, listeners will be interested in it, too. Soli: ADHD doesn't go away. Let me say, as well, it's not a life sentence. It's just a different type of behaviour. There are all sorts of very famous, successful people with ADHD. Rory Bremner is one who goes very popular with his condition. Martine: I did not know that. That's really interesting. Soli: Oh, yeah. There's a really incredible documentary. I think you can get it on Catch Up on BBC. You can hear how his brain is working. It's firing from all different angles. Oh, I think will.i.am, as well. Soli: Adults and children are amazingly creative. They've got a zillion thoughts wandering around their head, which it shows up more in our school system because our school system is so rubbish that we expect children just to sit quietly, line up, sit on the carpet, be passive. Whereas, our people with ADHD, that's the complete opposite of what they need to be. Soli: Going again back to your question, an adult with ADHD will put themselves into a situation where their natural abilities and their natural skills and their natural way of behaving won't be a conflict. You're not gonna get somebody going working in a very quiet atmosphere of an office. They will do something a little bit louder and zanier. My son is a hairdresser. Soli: It's because he is creative. He can wander around. He can chat when he wants. He can more or less go and eat when he wants. There's loud music, which helps him concentrate. As an adult, you'll put yourself into the environment that suits you. The other thing is they're very disorganized. Again, as an adult, you can find those ways. You'll write yourself lists, have Post-It notes, do things on your phone to remind you, have alarms. You'll create a world around the things that you find difficult. It does affect adults, too, and adults do need help and support with organisation with going for lots of movement breaks and doing things in very short, sharp chunks and changing things up so they don't get bored very easily. Yes, we do have to still be considerate of adults with ADHD because it still exists. Martine: That's super interesting. I think a lot of teachers could really up their teaching game just generally by ensuring that they chunk things up into really small, attention-grabbing sections and supporting learners of all ages with their organization skills. There's a lesson in that, regardless of whether any of your learners have ADHD or not. We could learn a lot from just implementing those strategies as standard. Soli: Yes, yes. Some people just need help. "There's too much content here. I can't read it all." It needs to be in chunks. We need to realize what people's learning styles are. I'm an incredible visual learner and I need things being very, very clear with pictures and underline and bold. Those strategies really help our children with concentration difficulties. They can't just have a whole great, big chunk of writing or seven instructions or a page of 20 sums. It's too much. We have to chunk it up. Cut up a piece of paper so they only see one little part of an instruction or just give five sums. Soli: We use something called "red cup, green cup" in primary school. It's literally having two cups on your table, stacked, and if the green cup is showing, "I'm okay, that's fine, I don't need any help." If the red cup is showing, you stack it the other way, it just signals to an adult. It saves somebody having to put their hand up for 20 minutes. It's great. Something we haven't spoken about, which is the number one thing and, really, I should have said it right at the top, is our children with ADHD, their self-esteem is on the floor. Unless you get an amazing teacher who understands them, their life at school, they'll be labelled as naughty. They'll be the ones in the staffroom that everybody says, "Oh, watch out for this one. He'll cause trouble." Soli: Already, teachers have very negative expectations. The other children will see them as the one who is always being told off. Classically, they're the ones who do something just for that extra little bit of time. They'll get noticed. But the smart, clever ones will stop before the adult comes in. The child with ADHD will be the one always in trouble. Social relationships are nonexistent, really. My son has very, very limited friendships even now. New Year's Eve, he had to go out with his little sister because he didn't have friends. Birthdays, he never got invited to birthday parties. Never invited to play dates. The self-esteem of our children with ADHD is horrendous. We need to do everything we can just to build them up. Soli: Just going back to that red cup, green cup, that is such a subtle way of saying, "I need help." Nobody even needs to notice. The teacher then just goes over quietly and then just supports and helps the child. Martine: In terms of supporting learners with ADHD, clearly working with them on their self-esteem is really important. Through the discussions that we've had, I suspect that teachers getting to know their learners really well and anticipating issues is important, too. I would expect that. Soli: Yes. Yes. It's vital, really, because a lot of our children with ADHD want to learn. They're very creative. They've got great ideas. But they just probably need to learn in a different way. As we've said before, they really need help with organization. Visuals are great to use. Visual timetables, visual schedules, so they know the order of a day or an order of a session and they don't get overwhelmed. They might have real difficulty keeping still. There are some great resources that you can use. There are some wobble cushions, which sounds bizarre, but they're inflatable cushions that sit on the chair and it keeps children still. I don't know what the magic is behind it, but it's to do with their sensory equilibrium being balanced. Soli: You know the yoga bands, the stretchy yoga bands? You put those on the chair legs and the bottom and then a child can just keep kicking them and pressing their feet against them. All these things are aiding concentration because instead of them fiddling and squirming and disrupting and disturbing other people, these other little strategies can actually help them focus and concentrate. But saying that, if a child works better by kicking off their shoes and laying on the floor on a cushion to do their writing, I would say, "Why not?" If it suits your classroom, if it suits the environment, and he or she is going to be focused, not disturbing everybody else, might not be able to sit on a chair for 20 minutes. Might be able to do it for 10 and then as long as he's asking permission and just, "Would you mind if I just go and finish the rest on the floor?" Fine, if he gets the work done. Soli: Also, fiddle toys. A lot of our children do need to fiddle. I know we had the fidget spinners, which were banned. I think it was such a shame 'cause they're so great for our ADHD children. But I do understand why they were banned, 'cause they were a little bit dangerous. But it was great for our self-esteem of our children because, all of a sudden, they had a gadget that everybody else wanted and it made them feel really special. That was, for me, a win-win. But there are some great fiddle toys. There's one that's lots of little colored blocks on an elastic string. They're £1.50 and children can fiddle with those and they're silent. They don't disrupt or disturb anybody else. Soli: I say to my children, "If it disturbs you and makes you lose focus, you're not having it. If it disrupts anybody else around you, you're not having it." If they can quietly fiddle, or Blu Tack is also very good if it makes them concentrate then fine. Let them have it. It's really not a problem. The other thing, our children are very impulsive. Quite often, it's very hard for them if the teacher is saying something and they just are desperate to call it out, they'll call it out because they don't have the brakes to, "Do you know what? I'll just wait my turn." If you give a child a whiteboard or pen and paper so that they can write their answer and then almost show it up to the teacher so that she can see and just do a silent thumbs up and a smile, quite often that's enough. Soli: I keep saying "he" because a lot of our children with ADHD are boys, or more boys are diagnosed. Girls tend to not have the hyperactive element, so are quiet. They're ADD without the hyperactive. But most of them are boys. All they want to do is know that they've been seen and they've been heard. If you do this whiteboard thing and hold up their answer and smile and thumbs up, quite often that sort of thing is enough. You could try recording in different ways. If they find writing difficult, then maybe a laptop or speech to text software or using a little sound button. Sound buttons are great, actually. I don't know if you've come across them, Martine. Soli: They come in all different guises, but basically it's little recording device. It could either be something that looks like a giant Smartie and then you press it and you can record a message for, say, 30 seconds. What an assistant could do, what the teacher could do, could record the instructions. "Do five sums and then come and see me," or "Do five sums and show me your red cup." The child then just keeps listening to the instruction or they could use it for if a child forgets what their sentences they need to write, or forgets a plan that they need to do, or needs to use it to remind themselves of a job that they need to do. They're also really great. If you Google "sound buttons," they're really good. They're in the SEN bit of catalogues. They're really, really good. I recommend them, as well. Soli: Yeah, there's just so many. Visuals, visuals are always great just to remind our children what to do and to keep on track. As I said before with a lot of these things, so many of the other children in the class can also benefit. Who wouldn't want to kick off their shoes if it makes them feel comfortable or sit on a wobble cushion if it helps them or have their work chunked up or use visuals? Also, who wouldn't want to be made to feel special? These techniques really work for our children with ADHD, but other children, as well. I think the underlying things is that as adults, we must just look and understand the behaviour and change our reaction to a behaviour and don't always be so quick to tell off or to say, "Why did you do that? Weren't you thinking?" Soli: Quite often, our children are not thinking. That's part of the difficulty. Try to really understand the behaviour and react to it differently and just make our little children just feel special and valued and listen to their opinions. Martine: There are some great strategies there, Soli. As an adult learner, who doesn't want to feel valued? You're absolutely right. I think, ultimately, as teachers, it's our jobs to facilitate an environment where everybody has an equal opportunity to learn. By employing these strategies, we are really going to create a fantastic environment for our children, for our adults, for our learners, whoever it is you have responsibility for. Thank you for sharing those strategies. I think they've been really helpful. I hope that everyone listening has taken away all sorts from your wise words. Soli: Yeah, well, thank you. I'm so super passionate about changing things up. It's so simple. As teachers, we've got these little people's worlds in our hands, their futures, without being too dramatic. We can change the way these children feel about themselves. It's so easy to do. We can make them feel successful and valued. No child gets up in the morning and just thinks, "I really hope I'm shouted at today. I really hope I'm kept in at playtime. I really hope nobody plays with me." Everybody gets up in the morning and wants to have a good day. I think it's up to us educators to make all our little people have a good day. Martine: Definitely. I quite agree with that. Well, thank you, Soli. I have one final question for you and it's an important one. Where can people find you online? Soli: Well, go to my website, which is Soli-Lazarus.com. That is a lovely hub for all my other bits and bobs that I do. As I say, I've got some training online videos that are free to watch. One is how to stop the rudeness. One is how to build up self-esteem. One is blowing wide open the myths surrounding ADHD. Those are free to watch. Also, there are links to my mentoring program and my blog. I write a regular blog and I've got a fabulous Facebook group, which is just full of lovely, lovely parents who are just trying to get some answers to some questions and we give each other support. I offer some great free resources. Pop along to that website and you'll find my links there. Martine: That's brilliant. Thanks, Soli, and thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure speaking with you.

Episode 8 of The Teaching Space Podcast asks and (hopefully) answers the question "what's the difference between coaching and teaching?" Podcast Episode 8 Transcript Welcome to episode 8 of The Teaching Space Podcast. Today's episode asks the question "what is the difference between coaching and teaching?" This question arose out of a discussion in The Teaching Space Staff Room Facebook group. One of the members suggested this would be a good topic to cover in a podcast, so I am responding to that. Incidentally, if you aren't a member of the Facebook group, it would be great to have you in there because, as you can see, you can influence the topics I cover on the show. Terminology  The terms teaching or training and coaching are often used interchangeably but actually, there is a distinct difference between the two, and that's what we're about to explore.  What is Teaching? Teaching is concerned with the acquisition of new knowledge. A teacher uses their own knowledge and experience, as they are a subject expert, to help learners learn and ultimately become more knowledgeable in their subjects. Teaching is focused on learning, and the ownership of change lies predominately with the teacher. Let's compare that to coaching. What is Coaching? The role of the coach is to help you refine and develop the skill that you have learned. Coaches help people to help themselves. It's assumed that if you're being coached, you have the knowledge you need already. The way a coach helps you is by asking questions and working with you to tease out that knowledge. Coaching is focused on development.  There is a bit of a misconception that coaching is very fluffy and all about emotions and things like that. But it's not that at all. It's highly structured and it gives the ownership of change to the individual. And that's very different teaching where the ownership of change rests with the teacher.  The Coaching Continuum An interesting way to think about teaching and coaching is called the coaching continuum.  There is a diagram at the end of this post.  Just imagine a line one end has an arrow pointing to the left and one to one end has an arrow pointing to the right. So the two arrows are pointing away from each other. One end is directive or push. And this is where the teacher is directing the conversation, knows the answer and pushes the coachee/learner towards the knowledge they need. So this is push. The other end is non-directive or known as pull, where the coach assumes the coachee has the answer already. They might not know it yet. They just need help pulling those solutions out or bringing that knowledge out of them.  So teaching is more push, and coaching is more pull.  Teaching is directive. Coaching is non-directive Context Let's put this into context by giving you an example that you can relate to. Let's use a technology for learning staff development situation. A teacher might deliver a staff development session showing fellow colleagues how to use Google Drive. The teacher has the prior experience of Google Drive and they are going to impart their knowledge and experience to their colleagues, who are the learners in this situation. In a coaching situation, you might have a technology for learning coach working with a colleague who would like to transform their teaching practice. They want to explore differentiation by using technology. So what the coach would do is help that colleague analyze how they're using tech at the moment, look at what their aims are, and gradually, through a process of effective questioning, extract the way forward from their coachee and enable that colleague to develop their use of technology for learning. I hope those examples have explained the difference between coaching and teaching clearly.  Teacher or Coach? So what are you, a teacher or a coach, or are you a combination of the two? I genuinely believe that good teaching is a combination of teaching and coaching. Gone are the days when the teacher was a content delivery mechanism. If your learners want to know how to do something they don't need you to tell them, they need you to create an environment in which they can learn. If you are going to just tell them they may as well Google it. They may as well go to YouTube and find a video to show them how to do stuff. The role of the teacher is to facilitate learning and by becoming a facilitator, surely you are taking on the mantle of the coach on many occasions? Discussion  I think this could be a really interesting conversation for us to have in our Facebook group, so if you aren't a member please join us. Let's talk about the fact that I don't see many teachers being trained to be better coaches. Surely coaching should form a really big part of our teacher training qualifications? This is definitely a good conversation to be had.   Wrap Up Please consider leaving a positive iTunes review for the podcast. By doing this you will ensure that the podcast is presented to people who search for teaching podcasts. And that means that we can get more teachers and trainers listening to the show. Thank you so much for doing that. Thank you for joining me. I hope you enjoyed episode 8 and that you'll tune in next time. 

Episode 7 of The Teaching Space Podcast investigates Medium, the popular blogging and social media tool. Podcast Episode 7 Transcript Welcome to episode 7 of The Teaching Space Podcast. Before, we start, if you can hear any weird crunching sounds in the background, I'm afraid that's my dog. She's joining me for recording today. In this episode, I am going to introduce you to an exciting social media platform from which I get a fantastic wealth of content related to teaching and training. That platform is Medium. About Medium So let me tell you a bit about Medium. It was created by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams in 2012. The idea behind it was that people would be allowed to share more in-depth articles than the 140 characters they shared on Twitter (which is, of course, now a lot longer than that, but at the time it was a hundred and forty characters). According to Medium's website: "Medium taps into the brains of the world's most insightful writers, thinkers and storytellers, to bring you the smartest takes on topics that matter. So whatever your interests, you can always find fresh thinking and unique perspectives."  And there are some great education thought leaders on Medium.  But is it Social Media, Really? Well, I would tend to refer to it as social journalism. It's more of a blogging platform than a traditional social media platform like Twitter or Facebook. That being said, the manner in which quality writing rises to the top is social interaction. So if you read an article that you like you can 'clap' it. That means you upvote that article. And that's how they quality control. Medium Lingo To explain a little Medium lingo: [Blog] posts are called 'stories' and they are tagged according to subject or theme. 'Publications' on Medium are distributing hosts that carry articles and blog posts like a newspaper or a magazine. The articles published or saved on it can be assigned editors and can be saved as drafts. If you've got a publication you can also share 'letters' on Medium. A letter is a way of connecting with your publication's followers and starting a conversation. A letter is delivered to the inboxes of all the people who follow your publication. It's also a post in its own right so it can be recommended, highlighted built upon, and indeed have something of a life of its own. Membership Model From what I can tell, Medium used to be totally free but they now run on a membership model. As a member of Medium, you get access to exclusive content as well as audio options. This is why Medium is now my new favourite content location of choice - the audio option! In previous episodes, I've mentioned that I'm an audiobook fan and I consume a massive amount of content that way. So the idea of having ready access to excellent articles in an audio format really ticks my boxes.   The fees for becoming a member of Medium, at the time of writing, are either 5 dollars a month or 50 dollars a year. Another added bonus of being a member of Medium is that you get a much better bookmark section. My Favourite Categories I keep an eye on art, education, teaching, learning and education technology. There are some fantastic articles available on those tags. A favourite article I've read recently has been about reorganising your smartphone so you are less dependent on it and less distracted by it. And I totally changed my smartphone usage off the back of this one single article. Here it is: Beautility. Sharing Your Content on Medium Now clearly I focus on using Medium to consume content.  But you can share your own content on Medium as well, you can become a blogger on Medium. I have my own blog at theteachingspace.com/blog (as you know). But part of my blogging process now involves sometimes cross-posting my content to Medium. Start Your Own Blog If you've ever thought about starting your own education blog, but you've been a bit nervous about the technology (you don't want to set up your own website or anything like that) then you could do a lot worse than starting your blog on Medium. There is a real emphasis on high-quality storytelling on Medium. The words are way more important than the tech. If you were interested in starting a blog, I would really recommend Medium as a starting point. I would, however, include the caveat that eventually you want to build your blog on your own turf i.e. create your own website to retain more control over your content. If you are going to start with Medium, find a way to get the email addresses of the people who follow you on Medium so that if you decided to move from Medium you'll be able to contact followers and let them know. When it comes to blogging, generally building your blog on someone else's turf isn't recommended. However, with Medium, you have such a good audience ready and waiting for your content. I think it is a really valid and recommended starting point for education bloggers. So What do You Think?  Are you a Medium user already? Do you share content there now or do you use it to consume content? I am a new user, so this episode is certainly not the ultimate guide to using Medium. It's just what I've picked up over the past month or so that I've been using the platform. All I can say is so far I like it a lot. The content is extremely interesting and it's high quality as well. So it gets a massive thumbs up from me. Let me know what you think. Wrap Up I'm keen that The Teaching Space podcast is discovered by as many teachers and trainers as possible and you can help me with this. If you enjoyed the episode please consider leaving a positive iTunes review and that way the show will be served up to more people when they search for teaching podcasts. Thank you in advance for that. And thank you very much for joining me for Episode 7.

Episode 6 of The Teaching Space Podcast explores 5 ways teachers can mark or grade faster and smarter. Podcast Episode 6 Transcript Welcome to episode 6 of The Teaching Space Podcast. In the last episode, I promised we would be delving into ways teachers can mark or grade faster and smarter. And that's what we're going to talk about today. 1. Feedback Abbreviations; My first top tip is to come up with abbreviations for your feedback. Make a note of any feedback comments you seem to be repeating and then abbreviate them and provide learners with a key to your abbreviations. Here's an example. You have a learner who has made a spelling, punctuation or grammar error, for example, they've missed out an apostrophe. Rather than typing or writing "please can you check your spelling here, there seems to be an apostrophe error." You might put "P-A". (Punctuation-Apostrophe). Put these abbreviations in a spreadsheet and have your spreadsheet open by your side when you are marking. Also, provide your learners with a link to your abbreviation spreadsheet so they can understand what you mean. This also works for marking by hand. You don't have to mark electronically to use abbreviations. 2. Feedback Database Expanding on the idea of marking abbreviations you could create a database of feedback comments and then copy and paste them into your learner's assignments. So rather than abbreviating the comments, have the comments in full but make use of copy and paste. I find this works well if you are using a google sheet for your database of comments and if you are copying and pasting those comments into comments on Google Docs. This, unfortunately, doesn't work if you are marking by hand. An alternative for creating your database of feedback comments in Google Sheets would be to use the Chrome Extension called Permanent Clipboard. 3. Use Rubrics According to UC Denver: A rubric is a scoring guide that helps teachers evaluate student performance based on a range of criteria. A rubric lists the criteria or characteristics that student work should exhibit and describes specific quality levels for those criteria. Rubrics are typically presented in a table format. You'd have the criteria down one side and the various levels of achievement or quality across the other side and then the evidence that you're looking for would be in the blocks is in between.  Here's an example from the excellent Cult of Pedagogy. Using a rubric saves time and allows you to mark faster and smarter because it cuts out a lot of thinking time for you. It also brings a degree of consistency and fairness to your marking. And it's really easy for learners to understand from a rubric where they've gone wrong or what they need to do in order to achieve certain grades or criteria. Rubrics are also very useful for peer and self-assessment. We're going to delve into that in a minute. 4. Peer and Self Assessment Peer-assessment is, of course, when peers check each other's work and give each other constructive feedback before handing in. Self-assessment is when learners check their own work against set criteria.  This is where rubrics can come in handy if your learners clearly understand the rubric and what it is for. Of these two methods, for the qualifications I teach, I favour self-assessment pre-hand in. I would usually do this by supplying learners with a checklist of criteria and some additional notes to illustrate what I'll be looking for. I expect them to take on the teacher role and self-assess the work using my checklist with the criteria and the notes to make sure that they've done everything they can to meet the criteria. I'd expect them to mark their assignments with the relevant criteria numbers to show where the evidence is.  They are doing exactly what I would do as a teacher marking their work. Involving learners in the assessment process is powerful and allows them to take responsibility for their own learning. If they fully understand what they are being assessed on they are far more likely to achieve and work to their highest potential. The fact that it streamlines your marking process and takes the pressure off you a bit is an added bonus! 5. Video Feedback This can be a brilliant timesaver if you like marking electronically but you're not a particularly fast typist.  Ordinarily, video feedback would be a bit of a slog. Also, the files created from recording a video of someone's document are going to take up a lot of space. If you're not using a cloud-based solution like Google Drive it can all be a bit of a pain. However, I have found an amazing Chrome Extension that makes all of this really simple. That extension is called Loom. I've written a blog post about Loom here. What's really amazing about Loom is once you've recorded your screen you don't have to worry about saving the file anywhere. Loom hosts your file and it automatically generates a link which it places on your clipboard. So there's a link to the video and you can then just paste that into a comment on a Google Doc or email. Video feedback is highly personalised and if you make use of the nice little feature Loom has where you can have your face in the bottom right or left-hand side of the screen.   Wrap Up I'm very keen that The Teaching Space podcast is discovered by as many teachers and trainers as possible and you can help me with this. If you enjoyed the episode please consider leaving a positive iTunes review and that way the show will be served up to more people when they search for teaching podcasts. Thank you in advance for that. And thank you very much for joining me for Episode 6.  

Episode 5 of The Teaching Space Podcast shares 10 simple strategies to help teachers and trainers save time. Podcast Episode 5 Transcript Welcome to episode 5 of The Teaching Space Podcast. Today I'm going to share 10 simple timesaving strategies with you. My First Book The reason I chose this topic for today's episode is that I'm currently writing a book. It's my first book which is very exciting, and the book is all about being a productive teacher or trainer. That's why I thought it would be a great idea to tease some of the contents of the book with this episode. So without further ado, here are my top ten simple strategies for saving time. 1. Inbox Zero Inbox Zero probably isn't what you think it is. There's a lot more to it than just having an empty inbox. I've written a lengthy blog post all about how to achieve Inbox Zero. I highly recommend you check it out. 2. Stop Being a Perfectionist We, teachers, have a tough time when it comes to perfectionism. We are under a lot of pressure to constantly model best practice and to be perfect in every way. However, that will take its toll, and it isn't possible. We all need to develop. We all should have a growth mindset. And if you are striving for perfection all the time is impossible to grow. I talked about this in episode 1 of the podcast. Stopping being a perfectionist is absolutely one of the best time-saving strategies you can implement. 3. Schedule Everything I use a Google Calendar and that works brilliantly for me because I can see everything on my mobile devices as well as when I'm at my computer. And I have all of my teaching sessions in there. I have any marking time outlined and I schedule lunch. Yes, you heard that correctly I schedule lunch. Everything is on my calendar and accounted for. By giving yourself that level of structure, you can identify any gaps in your schedule, and you can plan things far more realistically. One of the other reasons scheduling is so powerful is that Parkinson's Law dictates that events will expand to fill the time allotted. Meetings are a brilliant example. If you put an hour aside for a meeting, that meeting will take an hour. Even if it only needed 15 minutes. So by scheduling everything you create constraints within which you need to complete tasks. Then if Parkinson's Law is indeed correct, and whatever you've planned to do can only take a certain amount of time, you are going to end up saving time.  And what should you do with that saved time? 4. Schedule and Take Breaks Taking breaks will keep you mentally sharp and make you work more efficiently, thus saving you time again. I'd also recommend setting an alarm on your phone for home time if you tend to work late. The likelihood of you doing good quality work after hours is pretty slim. 5. Batch Your Tasks Batching refers to the practice of collecting similar types of tasks and dealing with them all at the same time. So you could, for example, batch your emails. Rather than just having your email program open and responding to emails as they come in, you could allocate one hour a day maybe at the start of the day or the end of the day to deal with all of your e-mails at once.  The reason batching works is it reduces start up and slow down time. For example, the time it takes to open your email inbox and to receive said email might seem like a tiny tiny fraction of time, but it will add up as the day goes on. Even worse is the mental delay it takes to switch from doing one type of task to another. It also improves your focus because you're working for longer on a task so you can enter a state of flow as you work. Batching is a fantastic approach to productivity. 6. Identify Your Most Important Task of the Day... ... and do it first. If this strategy is of interest to you, I highly recommend Brian Tracy's book Eat That Frog. 7. Ask For Help Number seven is probably the most difficult strategy on this list. Ask for help. Ask your colleague your line manager. Ask anyone to help you. 8. Go Paperless  Put all of your handouts on Google Classroom or in Google Drive and share those with your learners. Not having to photocopy, staple and hole-punch handouts has revolutionised my lesson prep. I estimate I've cut it down by half. 9. Streamline Your Marking Process I'm going to delve into this in a bit more detail in episode 6 of the teaching space podcast, so please keep an eye out for that one. There are many different ways you can streamline your marking process. For this list of 10 simple strategies, I'm going to suggest that you come up with codes for marking. You can provide your learners with a marking key that explains all of the acronyms you're using.  But just by putting letters rather than sentences you are going to save a lot of time. 10. Segment Your To-Do List I use the following segments: today upcoming, and later.  I use Asana as my project management tool of choice, but you could easily set up a today, upcoming, and later segment system in Trello or Workflowy. I've used both of those systems as well and I highly recommend them. Wrap Up Those are my 10 simple strategies for saving time for teachers and trainers. As I mentioned, I am currently writing a productivity book and will be delving into the strategies and others in a lot more detail. Please consider leaving a positive review for the podcast on iTunes. I hope you enjoyed the episode, and I hope you'll join me next time. 

Episode 4 of The Teaching Space podcast busts cloud myths for concerned teachers.  Podcast Episode 4 Transcript Welcome to Episode 4 of The Teaching Space podcast. In this episode, we are talking about how to cure teachers' fear of the cloud. Let me just give you a bit of background on this topic. Background As well as teaching trainee teachers, I also work with experienced teachers to help them use technology in the classroom more. A couple of years ago, my college "went Google". In other words, we use G Suite for Education as our preferred main tech tool. I mentioned my experience of transitioning to a paperless classroom in episode 2 of the podcast. We use Google Drive for document storage, and collaboration and we also encourage the use of Google Classroom as an online learning portal. We officially went Google two years ago, and we opted for a gentle transition. In other words, we didn't switch off network storage for files on a set date, and we also provided plenty of optional staff development opportunities.  Our party line was that Google education products were the supported option at my college. People are welcome to use other products and other different types of tech, but Google was the supported option. On Reflection On reflection, I'm still not entirely sure whether that gentle transition was the right route or not. There are pros and cons with being gentle or being more aggressive with your approach. But we went gentle, and that's what we're working with right now. Embracing Change Some staff embraced the change. They embraced moving to the cloud and they got excited about. There were lots of other lecturers, like me, who did their Google Certified Educator qualifications to find out more about what we can offer. Other colleagues were terrified her the prospect of switching to a cloud-based document storage solution. The idea of using Google Classroom on top of that was just too much. Top Three Fears In my technology role, I have come across a lot of fear about the cloud. Here are the top three reasons: Security Lack of knowledge and understanding Lack of control I'd like to dive a bit deeper into those fears in this episode and perhaps come up with some strategies you can use if you have a colleague who has some genuine cloud fear. Everything that follows relates specifically to G Suite for Education. Fear 1: Security If I have a colleague who tells me they are very anxious about switching to G Suite for Education because of the lack of security in the cloud I tend to ask them this question: What's more secure, an unencrypted USB stick or Google's servers?  What do you think? Of course, the USB stick is not a secure option. It's so easy to lose or break a USB stick. Chances are the person that you're talking to about cloud security is a USB stick user. After we've had this conversation, I'd probably go on to explain that: Google will not sell or share any data that educational establishments place on their servers. If you are a G Suite for Education user, whatever goes into your Google Drive stays there. And it is not owned by Google. Furthermore, Google will not advertise to G Suite for Education users. More information on G Suite for Education security Fear 2: Lack of Knowledge and Understanding It's to be expected that colleagues will be nervous about a new system that they are not experts at using. They are worried their students will find them out. This is a legitimate fear and definitely one that I can relate to. However, what I would say is this: you have been using Google already for a pretty long time as a search engine. So there will be some familiarity there. It's quite intuitive. Also, there are some fantastic resources online both on YouTube and on the Google product forums and Training Centre. I highly recommend you complete the Google Certified Educator level 1 program. The online learning materials are free to access, and the exam costs $10. The other thing is that it's highly likely your learners already know how to use G Suite for Education (depending on the age group). In my situation, many of my colleagues teach 16 to 19-year-olds as were a further education establishment. We find that the vast majority of learners come to us from a high school which has already been used G Suite for Education. Often our learners feel empowered helping us learn how to use something new. Fear 3: Lack of Control Google Drive is a good example of something that causes this fear. It's so easy to share documents and collaborate on them that my colleagues sometimes are worried that they'll share things without realising and lose control over their documents.  The fix for this is a simple one really. It is all about professional development. The way I work with my colleagues to help them understand how to control their documents and how to navigate their Google Drive. We look at how to use "shared with me". The only solution to this fear is training and support. When colleagues see the benefits of using a cloud-based system, it becomes clear pretty quickly that the benefits are far greater than the concerns they have. Wrap Up Those are my thoughts on curing teachers fear of the cloud. I hope that's been interesting for you. I'd love to hear from you if you've had similar experiences to me or indeed if you are a teacher with a fear of the cloud. Please Leave a Review As you know this is a new podcast, and I'd really like to get it on the radar of as many teachers and trainers as possible. You can help me with that. Please consider leaving a positive review on the iTunes store so more and more people can discover The Teaching Space podcast. Thanks for listening; I hope you'll tune in next time. 

Podcast Episode 3 Transcript Welcome to Episode 3 of The Teaching Space podcast. Today I'd like to share with you seven books that have made me a better teacher. My Reading Habit I should add, at this point, that I read between 2 and 4 books a month. I'm an avid reader but I wouldn't be able to read this much if I didn't listen to audiobooks. I consume all books via audio, with the exception of maybe one or 2 a year. It's an extremely efficient way to read. The downside of this is that there aren't many decent teaching books on Audible which is where I get my audiobooks from. So the books that I'm going to share with you today are about general personal development. I hope you find them interesting.  Here goes: (1) Finish by Jon Acuff My first book is Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done by Jon Acuff. I struggle to finish things. I'm a chronic starter so this book really appealed to me. While Jon Acuff's book is actually aimed at entrepreneurs rather than teachers, it includes some highly relevant, sometimes surprising strategies, for actually getting stuff finished.  The biggest takeaway for me from this book was the fact that perfectionism is one of the main barriers to finishing anything. We explore perfectionism in teachers and trainers in episode one of the podcast. (2) Talk Like TED by Carmine Gallo Next up is Talk Like TED by Carmine Gallo. Teaching is, of course, far more than simply presenting. But we could do a lot worse than following the example of top TED speakers like Sir Ken Robinson. This book shares the public speaking and presentation secrets of many of the world's best TED speakers. It's definitely worth a read or listen.  (3) How to be a Productivity Ninja by Graham Allcott My next book is How to be a Productivity Ninja by Graham Allcott. Teachers and trainers are some of the busiest people I know, so this is a must-read. I'm going to read you out the blurb from Amazon because it captures the book perfectly: "In the age of information overload, traditional time management techniques simply don’t cut it when it comes to overflowing inboxes, ever-expanding to-do lists and endless, pointless meetings. Thankfully there is a better way: The Way of the Productivity Ninja. Using techniques including Ruthlessness, Mindfulness, Zen-like Calm and Stealth & Camouflage you will get your inbox down to zero, make the most of your attention, beat procrastination and learn to work smarter, not harder." (4) Presence by Amy Cuddy Book choice 4 is Presence by Amy Cuddy. If you have not watched Amy Cuddy's famous TED Talk "Your body language may shape who you are", you absolutely must! Following on from this talk, in her book, Cuddy shows us we need to stop worrying about the impression we are making on others and instead change the impression we make on ourselves. Cutting-edge science reveals that if we adopt behaviours reflecting power and strength we liberate ourselves from the fears and doubts that obstruct us. So by redirecting our thoughts actions and even our physiology, we are freeing ourselves to be our very best. This is powerful stuff and really useful for working with students as well as working on your own self-confidence. (5) Out of our Minds by Sir Ken Robinson Book number 5 is Out of Our Minds by Sir Ken Robinson (one of my personal heroes!) I'm going to sum up the book with a quote from Sir Ken. He's so eloquent that it's all I really need to read to convince you to read this book: "It is often said that education and training are the keys to the future. They are, but a key can be turned in two directions. Turn it one way and you lock resources away, even from those they belong to. Turn it the other way and you release resources and give people back to themselves. To realize our true creative potential—in our organizations, in our schools and in our communities—we need to think differently about ourselves and to act differently towards each other. We must learn to be creative." - Sir Ken Robinson (6) Getting Things Done With Work Life Balance by David Allen Next up is Getting Things Done With Work Life Balance by David Allen. This book contains a detailed explanation of Allen's GTD system. One of the biggest takeaways for me was the idea of having one trusted place to put all of your ideas and your to-do items so you don't have them scattered around in various apps and on scraps of paper.  While I don't follow the entire system of GTD there are elements of it that I still use today in my own approach to productivity. This is a very interesting read. (7) Mindset: the New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dwek My final book is Mindset: the New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dwek. In this brilliant book, Dwek shows how success in school, work, sports and the arts, and almost every area of human endeavour, can be dramatically influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities. In other words, our mindset. This book (Mindset by Carol S. Dweck) is transformative for teachers and learners alike. There you have it. Those are seven books that I believe have made me a better teacher. I hope they are of interest to you too.  Book Club? I have been thinking about starting a book club in my private Facebook group The Teaching Space Staff Room. Wrap Up That's it for me today. I hope I've given you something to think about.

Episode 2 of The Teaching Space podcast is all about the reality of a paperless classroom. Podcast Episode 2 Transcript Hello and welcome to episode 2 of The Teaching Space podcast. I'm Martine, your host. Thank you for joining me today. In episode one, I mentioned that part of my role is a digital lead. I am responsible for working with my teaching colleagues to help them use technology in the classroom more effectively. Going Paperless Keen to lead by example, last year, I decided to go predominately paperless in my classroom. What's Online? All assignments were produced online. All of my handouts were saved in Google Drive and accessible via Google Classroom. What's Paper? In terms of what didn't make it online, we still do several starter activities that are simply better on paper. If we have a discussion activity we get the flip charts and pens out. However, I photograph the flip charts and upload the photos to Google Classroom (via the Google Drive app) so I'm classing that as partially digital. Some learners prefer to have assignment briefs printed on paper so to accommodate their needs I also do that. However, the assignment briefs are accessible in a digital format. Today's Episode In this episode, I'd like to report back to you and explain what went well and the areas for development. I've based all that follows on learning feedback as well as my own observations. What Went Well? Assignments The vast majority of my learners have expressed a preference for completing and submitting assignments via Google Classroom. I should mention that I teach adults. If I was teaching 16 to 19-year-old learners they would have used Google classroom at school. So my group has a considerable learning curve to conquer in order to get comfortable with Google Classroom. Feedback and Marking Being able to leave specific feedback as comments within Google Docs has been a massive benefit to learners. It's also sped up my marking workflow.  Chromebooks We operate a bring your own device policy at college but not everyone has a laptop. So I provide Chomebooks to people who need them. I have noticed is there is a preference for my adult learners to go for the larger Chomebooks rather than the teeny tiny ones.  No Photocopying! A great benefit of going paperless is that you don't do any more photocopying. I used to spend ages and ages photocopying so it's a revelation not having to do any of that. All teaching resources live in Google Classroom. Catching Up Absent Students If I have a student who's off sick it's a lot easier for them to review what was covered in the lesson and then I will make a point of seeing them before the next session. However, I don't have to spend quite as much time catching them up as I would have if I hadn't put things in Google Classroom. Tasks While we still do some paper-based tasks in sessions. We do some based on the Chromebooks as well or laptops depending what people are using. I don't put those tasks through Google Classroom.  Instead, I create a template and then I generate a link that forces everyone to make their own copy into their own Google Drive. Here's how it's done. Independent Learners The biggest benefit I have found going paperless is that my learners have become far more independent and self-directed because I'm not handing everything to them on a plate. In other words, they're not getting a package of all the handouts and having everything done for them. They're having to work a little bit harder and this has had a really positive impact on the flow of sessions and also me giving feedback. The whole experience has without a doubt been improved by taking this paperless approach.  Areas for Development But what about areas for development? I hear you ask. I mentioned earlier that the vast majority of my adult learners got on really well with classroom and our paperless approach.  However, some didn't some found Google Classroom clunky and certainly not intuitive and they got frustrated and thought that it wasn't going to work for them. I'm pleased to report in the end it did. But the journey getting there was more complicated than it needed to be. Google Classroom Onboarding This tells me I need to do more work onboarding new students to the paperless approach. I need to help them navigate Google Classroom better and really understand the benefits of going paperless. I think this is something I'm going to do during my induction process. It is certainly an area for development. Barriers to Communication The other interesting point which was picked up in a recent lesson observation I had and that was people sitting behind laptops have a barrier between them and me and it is, of course, the laptop screen. I had a really interesting chat with my lesson observer about this. We talked about the benefits of having screen 'downtime'. I think this is really important and it's something I'm working on. It is a good reminder of the fact that you need to break your sessions up and get learners up and moving around and talking to each other rather than just being glued to a computer screen the whole time. That's not good for anybody. Initial Assessment My final area for development relates to initial assessment. Before learners joined my course I conduct a rigorous initial assessment to find out all about them and their particular needs. However, I think I need to emphasise the paperless classroom/ I.T. side of things a little bit more.   Other Areas for Development? It's been approximately a year that I've been paperless so I'm still trying to identify areas for development. I'm sure there are more than I've mentioned already but that gives you a bit of an idea of how the past year has gone. I hope this has been interesting to you. Will I Ever Go 100% Paperless?  I'll wrap today's episode up with the big question: Will I ever be 100% paperless? Honestly, right now, I think the answer has to be no. Sometimes paper and pen are the right tools for the job. I don't believe in using technology for technology's sake.  But what do you think?. I would love to hear your views on this topic and it would be great if you could share your experiences of going paperless either in the comments. Wrap Up That's it for me today. I hope I've given you something to think about. Please join The Teaching Space Staff Room on Facebook by clicking this link.

Episode one of The Teaching Space podcast explores why teachers and trainers often have a perfectionist streak and how to overcome it. To access the show notes for this episode, please visit theteachingspace.com/1.

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