My Digital Classroom

Once again, we taught our inter-disciplinary unit on the Great Barrier Reef. Unlike last year, however, we added a few new things to make the unit more interesting, effective and authentic.

Lat term we were able to place a Skype call to marine biologist, former teacher and current charter boat captain, Matt McDonald. As it is really difficult to have new software installed on the computers on our school network, I ran a portable version of Skype from my USB. These USB apps are great and I’ve been able to get around a number of software issues by running programs straight from the usb. My favourites are the portable versions of Skype, Firefox, Audacity, Camstudio (screencasting), Virtual Dub (video editing) and VLC media player. These programs open up the possibilities in the classroom and enable you to do a number of activities which were previously prohibitive.

To minimise the potential for the Skype call to drop out, I made the call during recess. The students handled this remarkably well and I was surprised by how excited they got when the image of Matt appeared on the IWB. Tapping into the knowledge of an expert located on the reef was invaluable for the students and they got to ask a number of interesting questions and have them answered.

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.