Bulletin - 24th January

Hi all,

First of all, a massive thank you for the work that you've put in this year - having someone in observing (as on Friday) always prompts reflection on how things are going, and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that we are brilliant!

Year 11 Parents Evening / Issues
- Exam feedback - please take the opportunity to ensure that parents are clear about the students' exam performance and what they need to improve. We will provide exam breakdown sheets for each student to be given out on Thursday.

- Please ensure that year 11s are being set regular homework and that this is being completed. I know that this is easier said than done; parents' evening is therefore a good opportunity to let parents know what is being set. A really good homework with limited marking demands is to ask students to watch the videos on the departmetn website, and particularly to target those areas of the exam in which they performed poorly. A good approach is to use Watch - Write - Watch - Check: students watch a video, write down what they've learnt, watch it again, check what they've learnt.

- Blogs - to help with homework setting and communication with students and parents, I've set up a blog for each year 11 class. Can I ask that year 11 teachers give serious consideration to using this to set homework - they are very very simple to use, and really take only slightly more time as a homework setting tool than writing the work on the board. The main advantages are that parents can be informed about homework and deadlines in real time, there is absolute clarity about what has been setand therefore greater accountability for students. Among the many other pros are the ability to link to resources, embed video, the capacity for students and parents to comment and ask questions etc.

Here's my year 11 blog as an example: http://www.cheneyenglish10x4.blogspot.com/ - I've only done 4 posts this year, but parents have really appreciated it. Here's an example from another school of a blog being used in a very time-efficient way: http://mrsryear11.blogspot.com/

The blogs are all set up and ready to go - you should have received an email inviting you to contribute. You will need to set up a Blogger / Google account if you don't have one; it's a simple process - ask me / Jamie / Nicky for a 30 second tutorial if you get stuck!

- Website: please use the parents' evening to plug the department website: www.wix.com/cheneyenglish/gcse - if you haven't yet shown this to the students please let them know about it. I've embedded a sample video from the website here so you get the idea - very useful for use in lessons also I think.

- Could we also use this as an opportunity to plug Poetry Live ... I'll get some letters printed and have somewhere for parents to be able to hand money and slips in on the night.

Books
- please let me know any other books you think we should get - I'll send the list around of what has been selected so far, but please do add any ideas that you think of.

Thanks everyone and have a great week,
Tom