24th January 2016

I re-visit Penal
We are finally in the third semester of our program. We visited Zalisha at her school Penal
Secondary School. The school had a very familiar feel to me. Both our schools were former
junior Secondary school plus I attended school next door for seven years. It was good to be back
in that part of the country once again. One thing I noticed when I walked into Zalishas lab that
was quite strange was that there were no computers in sight. Then I found out that she uses
laptops which were locked away in the cupboards at the back of the lab.
Our teachers for this field day were Salma, Ian and Shereen (our north group visitor). The theme
for this week was the affective domain. Salma taught her lesson first and her topic was data
security and integrity. Her lesson included a fun, short video showing what could happen if
people didnt protect their data. She also employed the kinesthic approach by getting the kids to
walk around the room looking for security flaws in the lab. I thought that Salmas lesson was
successful since she tried to make the class as student centered as possible. In addition she had
the children work in groups throughout the lesson.
Ian taught the second lesson and his topic was on hardware specification. Even though he didnt
have much activity for the kids the lesson was still interesting because the content was very
relevant and relatable to the kids.
The final lesson was taught by Shereen on the topic of Spreadsheets. She used gamification for
this lesson which caused a lot of excitement. It was a concept lesson which explored why we
should use spreadsheets, identifying cells and writing a simple formula. Shereens lesson was
quite good. She assessed the students learning throughout the lesson using the game as well as

she had them work the calculation using the tradition method i.e. paper and pencil and also using
the spreadsheet.
After the lessons we had lunch which was quite delicious. It consisted of a mountain of dhalpurie
roti, curried channa and potato, pumpkin, chataigne, curried duck, stewed chicken and mango
anchar. After eating we proceeded to our evaluation session where we looked at the rubric that
will be used to evaluate future teaching practices. After going through and discussing each item
on the rubric, we used a portion of it to assess the three lessons of the day. I found this to be quite
helpful as it helped me to get a better sense of what is expected from us according to the rubric.
We have three more field days and while I am looking forward to completing this program, this
one of the aspects of the programs that I will definitely miss. It is a unique opportunity that I
wish could be afforded to all teachers at some time in their career.