Easing the marking load

Today I discovered marking statement banks; it has changed my life.

I actually heard the idea of statement banks for marking floating around my school a couple of weeks ago. But it filled me with memories of writing crappy, unpersonal school reports a few years back by picking statements from a bank. Also the word "bank" scared me initially as it made me think that I'd need to write a lot of statements.

But today, the pile of marking on my desk was growing to a level that made me anxious. It was lunchtime, I had about half an hour, how was I going to make a significant indent on the pile?

I flicked through a pile of year 9 home works and looked for common strengths and areas for improvement. On a PowerPoint slide I wrote three what went wells, and three even better ifs. I numbered the WWW 1-3 and the EBIs A-C. The reality is, that if I am marking work in the WWW and EBI way anyway, I find myself repeating my comments over and over. If you have a wide enough range of comments to fit the work, it will still be personal enough.

 

Then it took me about 10 minutes to go through the kids work and write "1B" or "3A" etc. on each piece. I still pointed out spelling errors and so on on their work, and wrote a couple of personalised comments where my statements didn't fit.

Now, next lesson I will put my ppt slide up for all to see and the students can write their relevant comments on their work for me. This also helps them take ownership of their progress by writing out what they did well and what they need to improve.

This is going to make marking so much quicker. Try it!

How to write learning objectives

Some teachers I know struggle with writing learning objectives. Having mentored numerous trainees in the past, it is surprising how many of them just don't get it and end up writing lists of tasks instead.

I remember being taught about learning objectives in my training and it made sense to me and it's never been something I have struggled with.

Somewhere along the line, I fell across Bloom's Rose:

In the centre of the "rose" there are the 6 different levels from Bloom's taxonomy. Then moving outwards, there are various key trigger words that you can use to construct your objectives at each level. Finally on the outer part, there are possible activities you can set your students in order to help meet the objective you have written.

If you have ever struggled with objectives, then I recommend the next time you are stuck, use Bloom's rose. It's a great tool for your toolkit.

Happy new year!

How committed are you?

Today I got told that I had a lack of commitment towards being a head of department because I said no to going away for a second unpaid working weekend away this academic year. I have already committed to one.

This led towards me being in a bad mood all day and just wondering how much more committed I could possibly be?

I have literally given up parts of my life and things that I enjoy because of my job. I used to go to the gym. Now I work so many extra hours and am too shattered to even consider it. I speak to my parents and siblings a lot less than I'd like to because I am normally too busy or if not, too tired to ring. Or I'm stressed about work so don't want to ring because I know they'll be able to tell I'm down. I don't get to spend quality time with my boyfriend most evenings on a work night as I'm working. I can't cook a decent dinner because I'm worried it will take too long. I have broken nights sleep because I'm stressed about work. It never ends.

I understand as head of department I have a lot of responsibility, I get paid more and I need to have a high level of commitment. However, where is the line?

Revision lessons

It's that time of year when the exams are upon us and we are all doing lots of revision sessions for students. There comes a point when you get to your revision lesson and wonder how you can deliver the material differently to make it less repetitive for the students.

The purpose of this post is for me to record a list of revision lesson/activity ideas that I have collected and used to share with you all. Also I find it quite handy to have a toolkit of the things that I have used so I don't forget them!

1. Multiple choice quiz using either Socrative or the Promethean Race Car Game

2. Mount past paper questions on bigger paper and allow students to work in groups to annotate the questions first - what sort of response is being looked for? What are the key points on that topic? Then structure their answer

3. Higher level thinking activity where students are given an image related to the topic and there are a set of four questions round the outside to delve in to what the topic is about, such as:

• What is it? 
• How does it work? 
• What does it do? 
• How do you use it?

Higher level thinking activity

4. Pass the question - give the students an exam question to answer and a mini whiteboard to pass around. They are all only allowed to contribute one word each time they get the whiteboard. Once they have written their word the whiteboard gets passed on to the next person to add a word to gradually build up the answer.

5. Write a song - give the students a print out of the lyrics of a popular song (don't let them chose a song - it takes forever!) and they have to rewrite the lyrics with a revision topic.

6. Padlet - Padlet.com is an amazing teaching tool. It basically enables you to set up a wall/electronic pinboard where you can put different resources eg. text, images, links etc and can be contributed to collaboratively. As a revision lesson tool, particularly for key stage 5, I get students to collaboratively contribute to a padlet by giving them topics that they need to produce revision for to upload on to the padlet.

Below is one I created for my GCSE ICT students where they can access all of the revision material in one place.

Padlet revision

7. Wordle presentations - how many times have you asked students to prepare and present to the class to then listen to 20 of them read out the slides they are displaying? The Wordle presentation forces them to present without reading off a slide.

First of all, give students a topic or section of the specification. Get them to pick out the key words and create a wordle. Then get them to prepare a 2/3 minute talk on the topic. When presenting to the class, they can only have the Wordle on display and in front of them for stimulus.

Wordle

8. Stop motion animation - students create a stop motion animation using mini whiteboards or similar on a given topic.

Stop motion animation

Keep an eye on this post as it is a working progress.

Thanks

Demonstrating progress

I've just came across a great blog post via @CodeBoom on Twitter.

5 great ideas for demonstrating progress in your lessons by @mrocallaghan_edu.

http://mrocallaghanedu.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/taking-the-temperature-of-learning-in-lessons-a-few-tried-and-tested-strategies/

Promoting Computing to your students

Here is a collection of links and resources to help promote Computing or Computer Science to your students.

www.whatiscomputing.com

Promo video

Posters (think you have to be logged in to CAS Online to view)

Prezi 

Video on why students should learn to write code

I will add to this post as and when I come across more useful resources. Please feel free to comment below and let me know of any I've missed and I'll add them to the post.

Internet and networks vocabulary worksheet

Happy half term everyone!

I can see on Twitter most teachers are working throughout this half term, as am I. I am writing a year 9 Computing unit on Communication and the Internet, so I thought I'd take a break to share a resource with you that I have just created. If this was printed it would still be warm!

It's a matching activity for some Internet and network key terms.

It could be used for ICT as well as Computing. You could either use it as a worksheet or cut it out for the kinaesthetic learners. Might be a nice little starter, plenary or homework activity.

Here is the resource.