Teaching is a constant process of personal development. Not only are you always learning new things to teach kids, or new teaching methods, but you can often learn a lot about yourself. While teaching can provide lots of opportunities to discover these things, the crazy workload can be overwhelming, and you can find yourself with very little time to work on self-improvement. That’s why vacation – after you’ve had time to rest, catch up with friends and family, watch some TV, is the best possible time to set some goals. You can take a breath and make changes with a fresh and clear mind.
1. Get to Grips with Multimedia
Teaching doesn’t mean that you just need to stand and talk at your class, and students often respond to varied lessons. This means including short videos, which can grab their interest, and are super easy to make with Animoto.
2. Use Websites for Revision and Interaction
It’s super easy to create a website, and you can upload all kinds of documents and classwork onto this platform. It’s a great place for students to ask questions and catch up on revision. Plus, you can upload homework documents and links to revision tools here too. Creating a website like this is super simple with Weebly.
3. Adopt Different Instruction Techniques
No doubt you are the best person to teach your students; however you can save your time and some effort by recording your classes with Vocaroo. You can then listen back on what you’ve said, cut out any repetitive or irrelevant parts with Audacity, and play the recording to the class, giving you time to catch up on marking, and save time by editing your classes and getting rid of any redundant parts.
4. Improve Your Classroom Management Skills
We all have to deal with disruptive students, or challenging students. However you can spend your holiday time taking some classes and courses and getting up to date with the best new techniques so you can walk into your class confidently. You’ll be safe in the knowledge that you can deal with everything your students throw at you, and spent time teaching rather than dealing with behaviour.
5. Get Active in the Community
Politics has a huge effect on teachers, as cuts to education directly affect your classroom. You can spend some time trying to contact local political representatives or sitting in on meetings at City Hall to make sure that education in your town is awesome and is being properly funded by the government. You may be able to get class trips, funding, or supplies by pushing your local representatives.
6. Use Fresh Presentations
When you start working, you probably have a whole range of power point presentations, and you may have been using these old slideshows for a few years in a row. Take your holiday break to make them dynamic and change them up. If you need advice on how to write engaging slides, you can find plenty of help and support in the forums. You’ll get better engagement from your students when you have up to date and exciting presentations. Fortunately, these are easy to make with Prezi.
7. Organize Yourself
Every teacher has stacks of papers and folders that might not have been opened or used in years. You can go through these, get through all the clutter, and you may find some hidden gems that you’ve forgotten about.
8. Think About Your Mind-set
Teaching is a high-pressure job, and you have very little down time. You may need to meditate, read, do yoga, or even go on surf holidays, whatever you need to do to make sure that you have the right frame of mind to work.
Teaching is tough, so taking some time during holidays to improve yourself holistically can make a huge difference when you head back to work.
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