Opening Minds at Chiswick Community School

One of the tools we can use in the classroom is Voicethread. I have just tried it out to see how easy it is and I have to say, it is very simple indeed. However, I have not included a voice over, which it is possible to do. I may try another presentation and include speech – if you all promise not to laugh. As I was working on the “Emergency Planet Earth” scheme which includes work on the rainforest, I did this presentationon that topic.

As you know, we will be introducing this technique to studnets. I have got a short information sheet for you, in case you have not used it before, but I also thought this might come in useful
De Bono’s Hats

A friend sent me this link and I found it really thought provoking – it made me reflect on my teaching and so I thought I would pass it on to you all. It’s a list of responses teachers made about what we should always do or never do as teachers.

http://skipz.glogster.com/Plurk-Advice-for-Teachers/

Here is More about using Wordle

Thought it would be a nice starter for students to make one of these about themselves and add them to their blog. They can also print a copy out for display.

I have created a page called creation for all the resources for this and they will be added as they are made. Currently the schem of work, assessment outline and home learning sheets are available to download from there.

All schemes of work must also have a complete Home Learning sheet and a completed front cover

Scheme of work template http://www.divshare.com/download/4845566-6f9

Partially filled eg http://www.divshare.com/download/4845567-255

Home Learning Sheet http://www.divshare.com/download/4845568-0cc

Scheme of work front cover http://www.divshare.com/download/4845569-70b

The idea is that we do continuous assessment rather than just asessing one thing at the end of a unit. This means that when we are planning we must identify several things which will be assessed. As we are assessing the competencies those things identified must be the skills rather than the unit content. For example, we would assess the contributions to group work, rather than their ability to describe a creation story.

Below you can download an example for the creation story (which is actually not that great and will be changed – but should give you the general idea) and also a blank one which you can use when doing your planning. Students will fill these in as they go along and make a final comment at the end. Teachers will only have to tick boxes and make a comment with targets once all the work has been completed.

Creation Story Assessment http://www.divshare.com/download/4845483-a48

Assessment template http://www.divshare.com/download/4845484-54b

I am proposing that we have a diploma that students are working towards achieving at the end of yr 7. This can easily run alongside the new rewards system which will be in place by Sept.

There will be 3 levels, bronze, silver and gold and to achieve them studens would need to receive a specified number of points from their OM teacher or anyone else on the OM team. These could be divided up into different categories and they would need to achieve in each category to be awarded the diploma. To get a silver they must also participate in some extra curricular activities and for a gold, they must also do something outside of school

If anyone would be prepared to work on this with me to finalise details, I would be very happy to have the help – just email me

Levelled Competences http://www.divshare.com/direct/4845281-57b.doc

CLIPS Sheet http://www.divshare.com/direct/4845283-05b.pdf

Students copy of competences http://www.divshare.com/direct/4845284-acb.docx (please note, if using at home and you don’t have the most recent copy of Office you will need to download the viewer from the Microsoft site).

The actual competences http://www.divshare.com/download/4845441-295