Hi, I’m Lois Lindemann – welcome to my blog!
I’ll start by introducing myself:
I teach maths and ICT at Birley Community College, which is a secondary school in Sheffield, UK. The bulk of my teaching time is spent with Birley’s students (who are aged from 11 to 16 years old), but this year I’ve also started working with Y6 groups in our feeder primary schools to deliver some maths lessons. Some of my teaching links directly to other subjects, for example I work with our engineering students, who study a ‘Maths for Engineers’ module. Birley is developing an integrated STEM (Science-Technology-Engineering-Maths) curriculum, which I’m really enthsiastic about, so I grabbed the opportunity to get involved and help to develop lessons and resources.
Extra-curricular activities that I help to run include drop-in IT sessions at lunchtimes and an after school STEM Club. One of my biggest projects at the moment is organising a joint MfL-STEM trip to Paris in July 2010. I love creating displays, both inside my classroom and on the corridor in the maths department.
What else? I’m learning French (although I seem to be making slow progress lately) and I’m a cycling fan, but sadly only from the comfort of my armchair. Will this be the year that I finally put injury behind me and get back on my bike? I like walking, doing the pub quiz, maths, living in Sheffield, cooking, reading, crosswords, red wine, theatre, weekends in London, eating out, museums, gardening, going to the cinema, real ale and spending far too much time online.
I have run a website, www.morethanmaths.com, for my students for some years now, but I’m a newbie blogger, especially in education.
Who is this blog for? To be honest it’s mainly for me. It’s my learning (b)log, where I’m going to record things I’ve learned, lesson ideas that went well, useful tools and so on. Some of the posts on here are purely personal (e.g. notes and reminders, my own targets, lists of ideas to try out) and therefore are private, most are public and hopefully are worth sharing.
I’ve run a personal blog for a while now, but this is a bit different; I’m still finding my voice – and getting to grips with the wonders of Wordpress – so please bear with me. Any feedback would be most welcome (even if it’s to stay that something I’m doing is driving you mad!)
Finally, at the risk of sounding odd, I have to admit to having a split personality when I’m online. I have two Twitter accounts, two blogs, two Flickr accounts etc. My intention was to have one personal account and one professional, but the overlap between the two has grown steadily over the last couple of years.
My personal blog, photos etc used to be posted under a pseudonym, because my real name is just too easy for my students to Google and I didn’t want to invite them into my personal online space, but I’ve given up playing at being anonymous. Most of my students had tracked me down anyway.
My other places:
Professional stuff:
I am MoreThanMaths on Twitter, MoreThanMaths on diigo and MoreThanMaths on del.icio.us
I’m starting to share links and ideas with some of my colleagues via a newsletter which also appears online: www.morethanmaths.com/thelink
My site for students: MoreThanMaths.com (it is currently being redesigned, please bear with me)
Find my photos on Flickr and my presentations and documents at SlideShare
Personal stuff:
My personal blog
My personal Twitter account
My personal photos at Flickr
