Learner Evolution ~ Chris Harte

Home learning -an experiment with glogster

 

"Get your homework out please..." The murmuring and cogitating of excuses commences; "well I have done it but the dog ate the printer cartridge after weeing on my exercise book..." At Cramlington, we are trying for the first time to set home learning a half term in advance with core pieces (have to be done!) and optional pieces (you must do at least one). The idea is that home work is often a negative thing which interrupts the lesson and causes more problems than it is worth. We are still giving some home work tasks (like vocabulary learning) in the languages department and the half-termly home learning is something that runs parallel to this. The end product of the Y7 unit La Musique is a podcast about a famous Francophone artiste so the online homework helps to build up to that. I have used glogster.com to create the home learning online -it is an awesomely powerful tool that can be used to create interactive posters online - give it a go! Here is the home learning for La musique - any comment would be welcome!

Effective Participators - getting them ALL to work in groups using pie

I was talking today at a fanastic SSAT Lead Practitioner day at English Martyrs School in Hartlepool. Myself and the other delegates received a fabulous welcome from the wonderful Lesley Welsh who inspired us all with her inimitable style and bubbling enthusiasm for languages and who shared with us her fantastic ICT savvy (check out her post on Diigo - it is the future) and generously provided us with a USB memory pen jam packed with brilliant resources.

For my own part, I banged on (again) about developing PLTS in language lessons and one delegate made a very good point about the way that some children when faced with group tasks are definitely not effective participators and tend to opt out. I said I had a neat trick to deal with that but forgot to share it! So I shall do so now...

Participation pie charts  - at the end of a group activity, ask the students to draw (freehand and rough is fine) a pie chart showing the percentage that each member of the group has participated. If they are in a group of four, for example, there should be a 25% split (four equal portions of pie). The students are incredibly honest about this and the people who were messing around or just being emotional truants, get less of the pie, highlighting the fact that team members need to pull their weight if a group is to be effective. Simply highlighting this and then at the start of the next group activity telling the students that they will be completing a participation pie chart is often enough to get the ineefective participators to start mucking in. Give it a go!

As it is near Christmas, it may be a festive mince pie chart... 

Sorry, it has been a long half-term :-)

PLTS - thinking hard in languages

In the new curriculum documentation, we are encouraged to promote Personal Learning and Thinking Skills, but what does this actually mean in real world classroom practice? I am running a session at English Martyrs School on promoting thinking skills and here is the presentation...

Flip Side

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: charte)

The cards descibing Anderson's Taxonomy can be found here and are a really useful way of judging the thinking level of our activities. You can also download the lesson Tu as faim  and the Cards to be sorted and then plotted on the Living graph. Please post your comments on how succesful you found this lesson and any other ideas you would like to share.

Thumbs up, thumbs middle, thumbs down...

We have a "no hands up" policy in school which has the aim of ensuring that all children must be prepared to answer a question at all times. This is, however, not always useful when you wish to gauge understanding. In my classroom, I use thumbs up, thumbs middle and thumbs down to get an idea of how the students are dealing with certain aspects of the lesson; "I can conjugate the verb jugar in Spanish - thumbs up, thumbs middle, thumbs down." This is much more effective than "hands up if you can conjugate jugar" as I can see who needs further support or explanation and I often use my thumbs up students to then work with the thumbs middle students while I work with the thumbs down students.

On a similar thread, I use a very simple TUTMTD word document to monitor progression through a lesson. I put my objectives into statements in text boxes in my TUTMTD document and, as a class, as the start of the lesson we go through the statements  and do TUTMTD, which gives me a visual representation for the whole class of where we are at, we then drag the text box over the appropriate  thumb!

The really powerful aspect is that we can come back to the document at the end of the lesson and move the objectives text boxes, hopefully towards thumbs up. This gives a visual representation of progression throughout the lesson. I can also see where we have not made as much progress and take that into account in my planning for the next lesson. Please feel free to Download the word template I use to get you started.

Using texts in a different way...

1. Take any text (copied from the internet i.e. genuine or contrived) Put it into any WORD manipulation software.
2.Open the "find and replace" tool.
3.In the "find" box, put a space.
4.Leave the "replace with" box empty.

This will basically look for all of the spaces in your text, remove them and replace them with nothing! I.e. you will end up with continuous writing with no spaces. Now get the students to try and read the text out loud/put the spaces back in with a pen/put the spaces back in with a word processing package. The aim of this activity is to engage the readers in looking for clues other than spaces to try and decode the text i.e. punctuation, capital letters, cognates, familiar words. This is a very quick activity to prepare and can be used with any text.

Can you guess the film from this text taken from www.yahoo.fr/cinema

2. Word clouds - there are some fantastic word cloud generators on the net -the best of which I would say is www.wordle.net. You simply input words or a text and the website generates a cloud of the words which appear in your text. The interesting thing is that the more frequently a word appears in the text, the bigger it is in your word cloud - an excellent way to highlight HF words in a text, print out the word cloud, stick it on a piece of sugar paper and get the students to draw lines to a word and write a sentence of their own using that word. I used it very successfully with grammatical definitions for Y12 but it can be equally well used in KS2/3 and 4. Here is a short text in Spanish on "mi casa ideal" in Spanish (very common and not necessarily awe inspiring topic...) - what could you do with this piece of art???