Sometimes a countdown timer is exactly what you need in your class. Today for an English activity my class are working in groups. Every ten minutes I need to give out different instructions. Here is the perfect tool for doing that – on online countdown timer. There are lots of different styles to choose from with my favourite being the BOMB!!! As a side I have even used it at home to get my kids to eat their meals. They love it.
Click here for the online stop watch or countdown timer
Now that my projector is working in my class I have decided to use YOU TUBE a little more. It is a fantastic resource and the reality is it takes little time to find good resources. Personally I find it adds heaps to lessons and the students appreciate the different focus.
Today for science I had to do a lesson on levers. Here are a few of the videos I used in between a few notes and a practical.
Last week I began a new unit on fractions in Maths. After a couple of lessons going over some of the basics I showed a very simple YOUTUBE clip about fractions. My hope was to just provide some different examples about fractions to my students.
As I was watching the clip I thought that we could do the same in our class. So with no planning at the conclusion of the video I got them into groups, gave them a few parameters and then let them go.
My aim was to get them done in 4 lessons including the first lesson with the original video.
We completed it easily. Here is an outline of the lessons.
Lesson 1 – YOU TUBE clip / into groups / parameters / write intro
Lesson 2 – write ‘what is a fraction’ and key terms.
Lesson 3 – write worked examples / write on big sheets of paper
Lesson 4 – video on flip view
I then took the videos home and used coral video to make them. Took 5 minutes each one and this saved wasting more lessons on the students doing video work. After all it was a maths task and not and ICT task.
I was pleased with the process the students had to include how to add or subtract fractions and I did no teaching on this so the video served as an eye opener into this process. I will need to teach this aspect as the videos proved some groups have not grasped this concept yet.
I also found doing it quickly a benefit. We didn’t waste lots of time but the students certainly learnt lots. Sometimes we waste so much time doing these types of activities they end up hindering learning.
Here is an example of one of the finished videos. Hope you enjoy.
Chaos in the class today. For Maths we were finishing off some videos on fractions we had started as a class. There were kids everywhere, paper everywhere, cameras everywhere and one rather grumpy teacher trying to get things going!!
In the end we got there. Four lessons to plan, write, video and then edit a movie is a tough ask by the teacher but we got there. To cap off the day I got to eat the chocolate cakes that were used in the videos. YUM. Videos and lesson structure will come in the next few days.
Nick Rate
