The End of an Era and New Beginnings

I worked in the Manaiakalani Cluster for eight years, starting as a beginning teacher (BT) in the Manaiakalani Digital Teacher Academy (MDTA). Seven years of that, I worked at Panmure Bridge School (PBS), as can be seen by my class site links. As of December 2022, that came to an end, and from January 2023, I started at a different school.

Panmure Bridge School and the various staff taught me a lot, helping me mature from a BT to a slightly experienced teacher. I learned various methods of teaching, how to work with a range of people, and a little of how to manage groups of people. I learned how to use assessment to inform my teaching, how to use data to continually improve my practice (admittedly, I haven't shown my data on my blog), and I developed a habit of keeping my lessons and teaching transparent.

In my time at PBS, I hope I have contributed to them as much as I think I have. I became their "digital guy", managing the accounts, taking care of equipment and minor hardware and software issues, and the film festival management. Making films was probably the most fun I had, especially trying to push the limits of what was considered for educational purposes. More on that in another post maybe. I also recreated their website in 2020, and created streamlined documentation formats which reduced digital clutter and helped keep information centralised.

The school (School) where I work now will remain unnamed until I understand their digital policies much better. School is quite different from PBS, having a different demographic of children and families, slightly different teaching philosophy, and different systems. So far it's been a huge learning curve and I haven't even started teaching yet. We'll see what happens. We've already had some professional development training. More on that later.