My Digital Classroom

Our year sevens are studying Holes for the first time this year. One of the activities I got the students to do last week was to try to identify some of the links between characters and over time. I was originally going to get the students to create a mind map using a new tool I’ve found, called Webspiration. It is basically an online version of the concept mapping software, Inspiration. Unfortunately our network doesn’t have the latest version of flash so I had to think of an alternative. I then turned to bubbl.us and created the mind map below which contains most of the major characters. I started to create links between the characters but, unlike webspiration, I cannot write down why they are linked. I therefore had this up on the screen and the students had to come up with their own links for each of the characters. As the links were left blank, students could use their knowledge of the novel to come up with links of various depth. It was amazing to hear the range of different links that the students came up with for each of the characters.

Following on from this, I then got them to construct a timeline of the novel using 36 cards from the scholastic website. I had intended to use the website itself and the Holes Match ‘em up game, but we had the same flash issue. It was interesting to see the different strategies employed by the students to complete this task, some working systematically, some working in teams, while others seemed to have no particular strategy.

Both of these activities worked well with my classes and they were extremely motivated to get both tasks done. When studying next year, I would like to use webspiration as the students then have to create the whole mind map and have to link the characters themselves, rather than having links already made and then just working out what the links are. I could also use the IWB more in getting the students to come up and make the links between the characters, rather than having them already there.

I’m sure anyone who has used the Activotes, or any other ’student response system’ can testify, the students absolutely love them. They are a great way to get kids excited about doing a quiz and revising for a test, whilst also giving teachers an idea about the areas they need to go over with certain students.

While we have a lot of IWBs at school, we have one class set of Activotes that reside in the Resource Centre (and are loaned out to teachers). Therefore, I am not someone who is going to get them out for a lesson just so I can do an ad hoc question about the students opinion on a certain topic. That’s what classroom discussion is for. So here’s how I generally use the Activotes:

At the conclusion of a unit in SOSE (History/Geography/Economics), I give the students a quiz using the activotes which I use as part of my formative assessment. I can then see the areas which I need to revisit with different members of the class. Ok, nothing new and I’m sure it’s how they get used most of the time. Incidentally, I don’t like to use them for summative assessment, as there is only so much information you can gain about a student’s understanding from a multiple choice test. What I create out of this quiz instead is a revision sheet that contains the questions from the revision test and whether or not the students got these answers correct.

Revision sheet

At the end of the quiz, I export the results to an Excel file and set up a new sheet with IF statements that will put in “correct” or “incorrect” into each cell, depending on the student’s answer for that question.

I then mail-merge the Excel file with a Word document that has all the questions on it, along with the student name and their result in the revision test. The students are then given this as their revision sheet for the unit test. For those students who perform below par on the revision test, I also give them a more structured sheet to aid in their revision.