Experienced a Thunk lately?

Last Friday, the staff of Shrewsbury High School enjoyed a thought provoking, stimulating and entertaining training day delivered by Ian Gilbert of Independent Thinking Ltd.  I thought I had better jot down a few things before I forget – it’s a bit random but here goes;

1. Pre-starter starters
   • This focuses on the whole idea of limbering up the brain before starting any work.  In the same way you would stretch muscles before exercise the brain needs a gentle wake up before getting used.  Pre-starters should have no right or wrong answer but should be simple, low-stress and fun.  How many words can you make from another word, one thing I didn’t know before about bonsai trees….
2. “It’s better to seek forgiveness than to ask for permission.”
   • A quote from Tom Peters, business guru – let’s be a bit more adventurous with what we do in the classroom.
3. Don’t spoon feed, use the 4Bs.
   • When they are stuck, encourage pupils to use their Brain, their Book (or web), their Buddy and then the Boss.
4. Following on from that, “Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do”.  In response to the question, how do you distinguish between all the A grade candidates?, an Oxford admissions tutor replied, “simple, I ask them a question they haven’t been asked before”.
5. Some pupils may think better while doodling or fidgeting
   • how many times have I taken what I think are distractions away from pupils so they can concentrate.  A fine line this one, it will take some time to work out who is being distracted and who is not.
6. As energy levels dip in the middle of a lesson, have a two minute break with maybe some brain gym exercises.
   • Good old rubbing stomach / patting head
   • left hand chopping, right hand sawing
   • right thumb tracing infinity left thumb writing your name (in the air)
   • right hand drawing numbers 1-10, left hand drawing letters a-j
   •  writing where you went on holiday
7. Use stories to remember things.
   • If a concept has 8 points, make up a story to incorporate those 8 points.
8. Choices – give pupils a ’sense’ of being in control.
   • Choose one of these five questions to answer
   • This is what we need to cover today, what do you want to do first?
   • Do one question from each section
   • From these ten questions, identify the 2 hardest and the 2 easiest
9. Thunks – questions that make your brain hurt and encourage independent thinking.  A whole list of these can be found here, but here are some we grappled with;
   • What is a tree?
   • Is a broken down car parked?
   • Is there more future than past?
10. “A leader is a dealer in hope” – Napoleon, at the end of the day, a pupil who may not be able to achieve high academic grades can still have hope of succeeding if they are able to think for themselves.

I would highly recommend Ian – he came up with plenty of relevant and practical suggestions which I will try and use next time I am in a classroom, moreover, he made us all laugh – just what teachers need for a training day at the end of term.

Windows Live QnA

I had been thinking for some time how to provide an ICT platform for students to ask questions of each other and in turn provide answers.  I had a look at some forums and also Yahoo Answers but I decided to go for QnA.  This is because of the tagging system and the motivational points and reputation system.  I wanted to be able to create our own school community within QnA and we could achieve this by tagging our questions with “shr” (Shrewsbury High School’s domain).  This makes it really easy to find all the questions authored by shr pupils and it is also possible to subscribe to an RSS feed for this tag.

So, as an experiment I introduced my form group (year 8) to QnA during a PSE lesson.  I tried to give them some guidelines and set them off questioning and answering.  Initially, I was quite disappointed with the majority of the questions in terms of the lack of thought and some silliness.  However, some took it seriously, and others found it fascinating and began to answer as many questions as they could in order to build up their reputation and improve their score.

I was concerned that the team at QnA would be slightly hacked off with this sudden influx of school girls asking some inappropriate questions and tagging everything with the mysterious “shr”, so, I got in touch.  However it turns out that they are “thrilled” for us to be using it in this way and they are really keen to work with us to develop QnA to make it really accessible to schools and classes.

What I would really like to see QnA develop is the possiblity of creating custom groups so that we can have an shr league in order for the pupils to see how they are doing against each other.

I think that this has huge educational potential.  Pupils have the opportunity to ask a question regarding their school work and the whole world wide community can provide answers.  The best answer for a question can be voted for and this will mean a consideration of several different answers and viewpoints before making a choice.  Added to this, pupils can provide answers for others and their answer could be voted the best which will boost their reputation and points.  An interesting aside for teachers – what if your answer isn’t voted the best and a pupil is able to provide a more succinct, relevant and knowledgable answer…. 

Clever use of tags could also provide interaction between schools.  If all pupils in shropshire schools tagged their questions with shropschool then pupils covering similar work in different establishments could assist each other with their learning.

Any other thoughts?

Pupil Blogs

As I started the new job I was keen to encourage the girls to use personal blogs to assist their learning. Each of the KS3 classes I teach had a lesson on using and setting up a personal blog. To ensure anonymity the girls have used their school login id’s in their url and they know that they shouldn’t include any personal details in their posts.

It’s early days but the results are quite interesting. Some girls are regularly using the blog to reflect on their learning and to share what they have been doing in lessons, some are only posting under duress in lessons. Some classes have also set up personal box.net accounts in order to link their work to their posts. I want to be able to assess work online by commenting on posts and linked work and I’ve started to do this but it really is a work in progress and the jury is still out.

You can see some of the latest posts from pupil blogs on the right hand side.

New job, new blog – ICT@SHR

At the end of my time at BRJ I was using the VLE to deliver lessons. There is no VLE (yet) at Shrewsbury High School so I have created a blog to deliver lessons – it seems to be going quite well so far and the girls are getting used to checking the blog as soon as they have logged on. Prompting responses to questions on a post by using comments also seems to be working quite well and the girls like reading the answers of others.

ICT@SHR

This looks interesting – Anim8or – 3D Animation

I came across this free download for 3D animation – Anim8or

The site seems really good and there are tutorials available – might be a good activity for an ICT club or for G&T pupils. Will come back to this at some point and see how I get on….