This tweet went out yesterday from Tom Sale A follow up explained that it was for year 6 students. Rather than try and squeeze these into a Tweet, here are a few ideas that could be used. Ration book cooking Design a propaganda poster Speech writing Local study – was the town bombed? any names […]
Asking questions trumps being told facts.
Our second history coursework piece asks students to analyse different interpretations of why men from Wales went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Rather than march through the background to the war (which I’ve done in the past, and did with the content for the first coursework topic) I decided to start with Viva […]
Things to try
Having written twice in the last few hours about a list of things to try this year, and knowing what my memory is like, I thought I ought to set one up. This page on my wiki will serve as a temporary dumping ground of things I would like to try, both general ideas and […]
8 Way Thinking
A great idea from Ian Gilbert via the Independent Thinking website. 8 Way thinking takes Gardner’s MIs and creates a thinking scaffolding based around: Numbers Words People Feelings Nature Actions Sounds Sights So, in the example quoted on the website, if the topic being studied was beer, students might come up with: How much beer […]
Creating facebook profiles
Followed a Tweet to this excellent blog post by Tomy Cassidy explaining his idea for getting students to create fake facebook profiles from everyone/thing from Lucifer to a chalk headline! This would work just as well for historical characters of course, which reminded me of a thread I had seen a while ago on the […]
Seeing details in main Google Calendar screen. Can it be done?
After a summer where I have touch pretty much no school work, and largly ignored Twitter, Facebook etc, I’m now feeling fairly chilled and need to start getting ready for the start of the school year. I’m using the same method as last year* to set up my planner on Google Calendar, and got to […]
Moodle Training – sucesses so far
We’ve now done two out of our three training sessions on Moodle now, and the reaction has been very positive. Lots of people making the right noises, and lots already getting stuck in with some courses for next year. The sessions were a little different that how I thought they would be when I last […]
Pushing the VLE
We’re having a big push on the VLE during gain time. This involves: 1. I’ve set up courses for each department. As a basic they’ve got for each key stage they teach. In some cases we’ve done for one for each year group and where asked, we’ve done some for specific topics. They’ve all been […]
Clarifying Copyright (or least, trying to slightly unmuddy the waters)
I’ve had a number of questions in the last few days as we do a big push on the VLE in gain time about copyright and the VLE. To address these questions as much as I can I’ve written the following page to go on our help page. I’m putting it up here not as […]
Mini Nick and Margaret
A quick add-on to yesterday’s post about timely interventions during student-led projects. It’s worth mentioning that some of my colleagues have been experimenting with what Paul Ginnis calls ‘observer servers’, but one what one of the SMART team christened ‘Mini-Nick and Margaret’ – students who leave their groups and whose job it is to go […]