Last year I co-wrote some BTEC resources. They were a huge success – I’ve had emails from schools all over the country about them. These images show the stats from the TES site and the follow through clicks to my resources site over the same period.
The popularity could have something to do with being the near the top of the Google search results for BTEC Applied Science resources.
Good news. I’ve continued working with Wheldon School in Carlton, Nottingham. Working together with Helen Cawthorne we’ve looked at the changes from September 2010 and written a biology module, complete with assignment briefs and a full set of resources. As with other resources we have shared them with the hope of raising the bar in science teaching across many schools. Please treat these resources as a work in progress – they haven’t been tested with students yet! (The module could also be used with current specs with some tinkering).
This is our interpretation of the changes and implications for schools.
Please leave feedback if you find these resources useful – hearing from others is a good motivator both for myself and the other teachers involved.
With the summer holidays drawing to an end I’ve sat down and completed the first unit of BTEC Introductory Science that I will be team teaching with the Brunts School in Mansfield. When we planned to do a course together we wanted to do something special, to get the best out of a group of pupils with special needs, and to work with the intention of developing the skills set of all members of staff involved.
I’m hoping that the pupils enjoy the course – no writing apart from assignments (and then only very little), some video work, and lots and lots of experiments. Hopefully pupils will be enthused and their love of science rekindled before we start the more content heavy topics.
It’s easy to lose track of the awe and wonder of science, with APP, learning objectives, starters, targets and other things that we end up having to build into our lessons. We intend to put back some of the fun into science and hope that leads to some good results.
I’ve uploaded all the planning and resources to the Wiki I share with the Brunts School. If you would like our resources, check out my resources site here (where there are lots more free science SEN resources).
Get in touch if you’d like to know more about BTEC Introductory or if you have any success stories you would like to share.
I have a website on which I upload resources I want to share with other teachers. It is hosted on Google Sites which means it is simple to administer and free of charge. I never bothered to advertise it, apart from mentioning it here on my blog, and posting a sample resource and link on the TES site.
I’ve been pretty amazed at the number of people (presumably teachers and teaching assistants) who have found my resources online. I’m getting 20 to 40 hits a day which I was quite pleased with. In the three weeks since I uploaded the BTEC Science resources, 230 people have followed the link from the TES site and the BTEC resources have had 800 page views (according to Google Analytics).
I attribute the popularity of these resources to the price (FREE!) and the fact that there are very few BTEC Science resources on the market despite the spiralling popularity of the course. My head told me I ought to sell my resources commercially through a publisher, but that means polishing them further, and filling them out to cover more topics. Having seen the dubious quality of many published SEN resources from authors who seem to have done just that I didn’t want to go down that route. All of my resources were created to use with specific classes and not for cash.
After completing my NPQH I returned to the classroom as an AST because of my passion for science teaching and ensuring students have the best possible science education. If giving my resources away means more teachers using them in their classrooms and enhancing the science education of their students then that is reward enough. Ultimately I want to see teachers taking my ideas and techniques and using them with their own pupils to improve science provision for all.
That is why I give my science resources away!
(And that’s why I like to hear from people who use them! If you use my resources in your science lessons, leave a comment below and let me know what you think of them!)
I’m halfway through some outreach work with Wheldon school, looking at some of their BTEC Applied Science assignments. We decided to upload the resources on here with the hope that they might be useful to someone (given the amount of time we’ve put in making them!).
The resources are available here. Please feel free to feel in the ‘Contact me’ box if you found them useful, or if you have any comments or suggestions.
Update: Check out the updated BTEC resources for the September 2010 spec posted Feb 2010
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