I'm feeling positive today

Anyone who has been reading this blog on a regular basis will know that this is my first year teaching in Switzerland, after living for 4 years in Thailand. Some time ago I wrote about the dip that people go through when moving from one country to another - culture shock - which generally starts in month 3 after arriving and can go on for about 6 months. I've now been here for 7 months so it is definitely time to come out of the dip. The shock of coming to a school that is so far behind where we were in Thailand is wearing off as I'm starting to reap the benefits of a lot of hard work to change teachers' attitudes towards the role of IT.

As I'm looking forward to March, I'm looking forward to more positive changes: we will start our tech training for one teacher per grade level, who will then be able to act as a mentor to the rest of his or her team. This will hopefully empower teachers to take more control of the IT and how it supports their units of inquiry and at the same time I'm hoping it will free me up from being so much based in the labs and let me do more work with students in the classrooms. The flexible schedule we started on our return from the Christmas break has now been running for 5 weeks and that is helping too. Some teachers are still very skeptical, but I'm loving it. I get to work intensively with just 2 or 3 grades each week, rather than having to spread myself so thinly from K to G7. This has meant that I have been able to run a photographic course with our G4 students, focusing on a different G4 class each week. We have spent the whole of one afternoon and the following morning walking around the school taking nature photographs, then coming back and editing them. With the old timetable these 5 period would have taken 5 weeks and it would have been hard to sustain the momentum.

As well as this the days are getting longer, we are getting more sunshine and the snow is gradually starting to melt. Yesterday I bought some spring flowers for my balcony. Life definitely seems to be getting better.

Photo Credits: These photos were taken and edited by Aleksi, Kristian, Anabel and Caitlin, some of my Grade 4 students