Closing Seminar

Day 1

We are having the last contact days as a whole group, and it is time to reflect our learning during the last 12 months.

We started the day by choosing two postcards that describe us as vocational teachers now and in the future. For me the year has been challenging. Combining two courses, children and marriage, and feeling quilty for not doing any of them well enough, has been hard. Also a serious illness in the family has affected our life.  But here I am, almost at the finish line! Now it is time to relax and spend time with my family. Therefore I chose a nice picture of a parent playing ball with a little boy. That is me for the next couple of months. I will be baking cakes on a sandpit! Anyhow, I will return to work in August. My second picture, a hunting bird, illustrates the next step I will take as a vocational teacher. It is time to start looking for a teaching position soon!

For me the iVet course has given mainly new teaching tools and technology. I have met great poeple and made contacts. I hope we will continue learning together even after the course! I had a great possibility to do my teacher training abroad and experience different school system. My MBA studies will be finished soon, too. They have helped me to gain more pedagogical competence; I understand the world of vocational students better now, and can recognise the factors that put a student at risk for dropping out from school.

I got nice feedback on my pedagogical method of motivating students to take part in a discussion task during the VOCII course. I think VOCII gave me a great opportunity to try teaching in an online environment which is not used for teaching that often (Facebook). I think Facebook is a great tool for sharing ideas and learning together when you want the students to contribute daily for a short period of time. Obviously it requires that the students are willing to register in Facebook. Also Facebook has got its limitations: quite soon the Facebook page starts looking messy, and some content may get missing or finding it is difficult. I would also ask the students to document their learning in another platform due to the limitations of Facebook.

Today we were also practising evaluating ourselves. It was rather difficult! I shall think about my competences in vocational education more later on. I think this blog is a good starting point for documenting my competence.

Anyhow, it is time to go and pick up my children from the nursery. Later tonight we will gather around to one of our fellow students' house and have a barbeque. Time for a party!

Day 2

So it is the very last day, or actually the very last hour together as a STUDY group. It has been a discovery journey like one of us described the last year yesterday. I think I have gained a lot of competence in vocational pedagocy, but there is still areas where I have to develop myself, special needs education f.ex. But I am definately ready to start working as a teacher. As I stated in one of the first posts, I think a teacher is never ready. There is always something to learn. You have to be a life-long learner in order to expect that from your students.