One of my favourite elements of my #PedagooAdmin duties is  going hunting.

The @Pedagoo feed flashes up hundreds of great ideas a month and some may well get lost (an educational version of “Can’t see the woods for the trees!”) and I work with the team to try and make sure we encourage as many people to expand their ideas from tweets to blogs.

One of the most common responses to any requests is “But that’s not exciting!” or “But it wasn’t my idea.” Sometimes people are happy to create a post without prompting. Those posts make us smile a lot. Indeed, often people who put up a post on Pedgaoo are creating their first ever blog.

I know from posts that I have shared, particularly examples of lessons that I have completed myself, that the feedback is both encouraging and inspiring. Usually I will try something, blog it and the feedback I receive means I have a fresh handle on IDL or differentiating the lesson more so that when I teach it next time, I teach it even better and it makes more of an impact. Not a bad reward for about 30 minutes of typing, really.

Today I tried the Blackout Poetry that Jennifer Ludgate @MissJLud had tweeted about in her #PedagooFriday. Thankfully, she agreed to expand this in to a post for us and the tweets have been  quite clear – people love this idea. It may not have originated from Jennifer, but if she didn’t share it on a blog, this would not be shared in time for people to plan interesting lessons with it this week.

In my classroom, we tried this with a Maths theme – being a maths teacher after all – for the annual Department poster competition. If we don’t win this year, I will create a schism and start my own poster contest next year.

My demo poem, as it was a low set class, turned out to read as follows :

One Escape for 1000 years

In 1840 prestige

128 Delux. Two zones. Two Thermals.

Enjoy Roman with 12 separate area.

The Perfect Trio

Two and Four with Temperature on 60 Degrees.

Set off just 15 minutes by car.

Offering discount of up to 60 percent.

Ok Relax, I am a better teacher than a poet, but they are hunting for how maths is used in the Times and the Edinburgh Evening News. (And a random French Language Magazine which has been untouched by the class!)

They are unaware but they are finding out how much the press depends on Numeracy to discuss the news.

Now, I would never have thought of this if Jennifer had not shared her post.

I have a plea. If you can, and you have 30 minutes, please write up a Blog post about one lesson that you think went fine. Even if you don’t think it was brilliant, others will.