Happy New Year!
After two days of complete and utter shell shock I think I found my teaching feet today.
So I thought I’d put a quick blog post together highlighting a couple of things from the week in the vague hope that it might become a habit
1. In ICT we’ve introduced a checklist system before students hand in their ESW work. They have to check their work against a list of criteria and then get one of their friends to do the same before they upload their work. The hope is that it will cut down on the amount of work we have to return because it’s riddled with silly mistakes. We’ve also told everyone that when they act as a peer marker if we then reject a piece of work for not being up to standard, not only will we be noting it for the creator of the piece, but also for the person that signed off on it being ok. Hopefully this should make the standard of peer assessment a little better as well
2. I’ve started a new group project with my yr 10 History class involving two of my new favourite techniques
Bidding for a topic
I put up a list of all the available topics and gave the class a couple of minutes to disucss strategy. Then each group had to say which topic they’d like. If, once everyone had given their choice they were the only ones that wanted it then it was theres. But if another group also wanted that topic then we went into battle mode!
Each group had to put up the case for why I should give the topic to them and I would decide a winner based on the quality of the argument, making sure I explained not just who won but why. The losing teams then had the pick of any unclaimed topic
Collaborative and Limited Presentations.
My digital tool of choice for class presentations is now Google Docs. It’s completely cloud based, so I haven’t got to worry about pupils not having the software, and because they’re all editing the same document I can keep an eye on progress and track who’s doing all the work.
To this, I’ve now added a list of limits that I picked up from the feedback from a Literacy course that some of my colleagues have been on.
Each group has to produce a slideshow with:
No more than 5 words per slide,
with 4 slides in total (no more, no less)
containing 3 key facts for the class to learn,
a minimum of 2 pictures (but you’re welcome to many more)
and 1 mark out of ten for significance.
Building on evaluations of previous group presentations I’ve kept one topic back for myself and I’m going to kick off next lesson with mine, so they can borrow and adapt some of the strategies I use (or not as the case may be!)