Sunday 16 February 2014

Independent Learning Folders


In the past I often found that students would find it difficult to act on feedback without extra support from me. So I spent part of last Summer creating these ‘Independent Learning Folders’. 


The folders (one for French and one for Spanish) contain various laminated help sheets for things such as ‘Giving Opinions’, ‘Giving Extra Detail’ and ‘Time and Frequency Phrases’, as well as some which give clear instructions on how to form the different tenses. 

  
The QR Code links to a Slideshare on my pupil blog

These can all be found on TES.

One of the focuses at my school's recent Inset Day was literacy and we were asked to work together with our departments to design a literacy based learning mat to help our students. I shared this idea with my department who loved it and my HoD has said he wants this to be implemented throughout the department, with folders in every classroom (wow!). One of the teachers running the literacy session then shared my idea with the rest of the teaching staff. It felt really great to have my work appreciated by experienced members of staff, having just finished my NQT year not so long ago. As a friend recently pointed out to me, it doesn’t matter how old you are, adults need praise too sometimes.

QR Codes

What are they?
QR codes are like bar codes which you can scan with your smart phone.



How do I scan them?
Once you have downloaded the QR Code Scanner app (these are usually free), you scan the code and it displays the information on your smart phone. This could be anything from a website, to an image or a text.

How can I use them in the classroom?
Questions and/or answers, reading comprehensions, differentiated activities, websites, songs, links to homework...

How do I create them?
  1. Click here
  2. Select the correct option on the left 
  3. Input the content which you want to be displayed 
  4. Choose the colour of the QR code 
  5. Click ‘Download QR Code’

Sunday 9 February 2014

Virtual Teacher


If I remember rightly, Virtual Teacher was introduced to my school by Paul Ginnis. I’ve used it a few times when getting the students to prepare for assessments. I created a PowerPoint slide with questions on and each question is hyper linked to its answer. 

It just means that instead of several students approaching me to ask me the same question, they can just click the question on the PowerPoint and it takes them to a new slide with the answer. I can then spend time helping the students who really need it. Here is an example I’ve uploaded an example to Tes.

Just click the question to get its answer; click the house for the homepage; and click the red arrow for the previous page. Feel free to change the text to suit whatever topic you’re covering.