Month: August 2015

Last week Jo Morgan (@mathsjem) posted a picture of a Wordle formed from all her tweets since she joined Twitter. This led me to think about my Twitter history.

Back in 2009 I had experimented with Twitter, but didn’t stick at it and kind of forgot about it until I set up my “professional” Twitter account (@DrBennison) on the 1st of May 2014. I then sent my first tweet on the 7th of may, tweeting a photo of some resources I was cutting up for a Year 8 problem solving lesson.

Inspired by Jo I downloaded my twitter archive and used wordle to create the following Wordle from all my tweets. 

  
  I really value Twitter for collaboration with colleagues across the country (and further afield) and would encourage anyone to sign up and start talking to people. I haven’t met anyone on Twitter who isn’t friendly, encouraging and always happy to provide advice and share resources. As you can see from the above picture, I must have engaged with quite a few people repeatedly for their twitter handles to come out large.

For the next week or so I have pre-written my daily blog posts and the main tweets announcing them as I am going away up north for a break. I may not have such a good reason to not be able to write my posts on the day as @MissNorledge but I have stolen her Twuffer idea and am giving that a go.

It seems timely to write about something that I think is very important as a teacher to give yourself a break sometimes. It is very easy to constantly be thinking about work, marking, preparing resources and planning lessons. And, now there is the added addiction to Twitter that takes more time up…

I love having access to the internet, and to be honest I do often find it a bit of a panic when I haven’t got at least 3G on my phone. However sometimes it is really nice to have a break and be free from it all for a while.

This is of course possible during the holidays, but to a lesser extent I think it is important to try and manage it during term time too. I try to do no work on a Saturday for example, preferring to work more during the week and do a bit on a Sunday. I think having a day completely away from teaching is really beneficial and helps keep me sane – it would be one of my top tips for anyone new to teaching.

I also think it is important to be aware of “the law of diminishing returns”: you can spend hours trying to make a resource completely perfect, but as you spend more time on it you have less and less impact on the actual resource. I once remember spending 6 hours trying to get a piece of Excel to do what I wanted it to do for a 10 minute segment of a lesson – definitely not time well spent!

Please wish me luck with having a bit of a break, I do struggle to turn off to be honest. Good luck to you too if you are doing something similar 🙂