My experiments continue...

Deep Zoom as I mentioned earlier works really well and I hope to add some onto the blog over the holidays. Powerpoint plex is another tool that worked really well. The students loved this as they could see all the work they had done in the unit but it also made the conventional powerpoint lesson a lot more interesting. See the video file below.





Through my short journey in teaching one issue has bugged me for a while and that is learning objectives, learning aims, learning outcomes, to be able to... (Your school may have a different name). I appreciate they are very important and that we should share what we want our students to learn but in my opinion the way they are put across is often very boring and the students also find this dull. While I will never claim to have the answer to any teaching related point I did find that this worked well last week.


Thanks to Ollie Bray of http://olliebray.typepad.com/olliebraycom/ I came across this website - http://www.lingo2word.com/translatetxt.php?tosearch1=ILY+mor+thn+wrds+cn+dsciB+%7E%3Ao+%21&searcher1=lingo - the website translates normal English into text speech. I tried with some of the classes this week and it worked really well. See the powerpoint below. I showed the objectives in 'text speech' to my year 7 classes and they really liked them and made them engage with the learning objectives.


A couple of other really useful websites:


You will have heard of social networking but give social bookmarking a go. The site is a place where you can store all your bookmarks/favourites in one place. This means you can access your personal favourites from any computer in the world. This saves a lots of hassle as you would usually have a different set of favourites on your different computers, I know I do. Also you can look at similar websites about Geography or any other topic using the tag system.


http://delicious.com/


Bloglines is really useful if you follow a lot of blogs and websites. Once you have signed up to an account you can add all the URLs of the blogs you follow. The website when you log in checks the different blogs and shows you when they have been updated. This saves a lot of time as don't need to check all the different blogs for updates yourself!


http://www.bloglines.com/


Mr. Still