teacherkit

Desert Island Apps for Teachers

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There are thousands of websites and apps aimed at teachers but if you had to pick just 10 that you couldn’t live without – the digital bare essentials of a 21st Century classroom, your desert island apps – what would they be?

Here, in no particular order, are mine.

1. Google Drive and Google Classroom

Google Drive includes Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Forms as well as many other GAFE (Google Apps for Education). Google Classroom is a learning platform for schools which brings it all together in a secure online environment. Drive and Classroom allow students to collaborate and share files quickly and teachers to create and distribute assignments, flip learning, grade work, and post notices. Indispensable.

2. Kahoot!

Without doubt this would be the students’ choice. Kahoot! is an enjoyable, game-based learning platform with many similarities to (the also excellent but less jovial) Socrative. Use it to build fast paced multiple-choice quizzes and class surveys or pose questions at hingepoints during a lesson to receive instant feedback from all. Formative assessment at its most fun.

3. TES Teaching Resources

If you didn’t already know, TES Teaching Resources is a vast online library of mostly free lesson plans and classroom resources uploaded by teachers from around the world. To be honest, it’s not all great but there are some real gems in there which are more than worth the rummage. The site is also home to Teachers’ TV; a source of high quality videos on teaching and learning in Early Years, Primary, Secondary and FE, as well as films to help with continued professional development.

4. Adobe Voice

This one is relatively new on the scene but I love the simplicity of this application for making short, highly-professional-looking animated videos. I have written about it many times in this blog and confess to being a huge fan.

5. Online-Stopwatch.com

This site provides a variety of different stopwatches and clocks which can be used to add a sense of urgency to any starter activity or plenary, help keep younger students on task, or be clearly displayed during classroom-based tests.

6. Educreations

There are now a huge number of apps for creating video tutorials on the iPad but I have mostly remained faithful to Educreations as it works seamlessly with Google Drive and is so simple and intuitive to use. As well as making tutorials, I find it useful for providing feedback on larger pieces of student work (e.g. posters or models). I simply take a photograph, import it into Educreations, and then comment and annotate over it before sharing with the student via Classroom.

7. Twitter

We all know that Twitter is essentially a virtual staffroom for sharing resources, airing opinions and generating discussion but it can also be used to support learning in the classroom. For example, I have used it to provide a running news feed, tracked hash tags, connected with other classrooms and industry professionals, and encouraged students to send live Tweets during field trips. There are lots of possibilities. Not convinced? Here is a useful post by the brilliant @ICTEvangelist on the dos and don’ts of getting started in the pedagogical Twittersphere.

8. Armoured Penguin

The best site I have found for making crosswords and other simple word games. All free and easily converted into PDF.

9. YouTube

Create playlists of videos on particular topics, import videos into Google Forms as a flipped learning activity, post video tutorials, find sound effects to really bring your lessons to life, or simply mine this vast resource for educational audio visuals. TeacherTube, TedEd, How Stuff Works, BBC and Sick Science are just some of my favourite channels.

10. Visible Body 3D Human Anatomy Atlas

This is the only subject-specific entry on my list and a costly one (at the time of writing £18.99 from App Store) but it is a simply stunning piece of kit with an impeccable 3D interface offering students a far greater appreciation of anatomical structures than the flat drawings of a textbook ever could. The high-resolution graphics offer smooth zooming, panning and rotating capabilities and the concise labelling (showing the name of each structure and the system hierarchy to which it belongs) make it particularly useful for older students during organ dissections and demonstrations. Brilliant.

So there you have it, my top 10 teaching websites and apps. I would love to hear about your own desert island choices!

 

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Awesome Lesson Starters

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Start the lesson with a bang!

What students experience in the first couple of minutes of a lesson makes a crucial difference in how well they engage with the learning intentions and as such, starter activites should be exciting, enthusing and unpredictable.

Here are some ideas for creating that ‘hook’ and maintaining the curiosity of students from the get-go.

  • Start the lesson with a fun or even explosive demonstration which ties in to the main body of the lesson. Sick Science has lots of great ideas.
  • Pass around mystery objects inside sealed bags. Ask the students to guess what they are and what they do.
  • Display apparatus, interesting objects and photographs around the room.
  • Play a short video on a loop and hand out questions about its content. This is even better if it is a video that you or the students have made. For example, a time-lapse video to recap the previous lesson or the steps of a practical investigation presented in Adobe Voice.
  • Write a true / false question or a statement on the board. As pupils arrive ask them to choose whether they think it is ‘true’ or ‘false’ or whether they ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ and to stand to one side or another of an imaginary line down the middle of the room.
  • Display a picture and a question. Alternatively, you can display a number of different pictures related to a theme and simply ask ‘What have I Googled?’
  • Play ‘Backs to the Board.’ Divide your students into two or three teams. One volunteer from each team sits in a chair with their backs to the board, facing their friends. Write a key word on the board, making sure that the players in the ‘hot seats’ can not see it. After you say ‘Go!’, the members of each team must try to elicit the word from the volunteer without saying the word or giving any clues as to its spelling. The players in the ‘hot seats’ then swap with another member of their respective teams.
  • Arrange for a guest speaker to be standing in the room as the students arrive.
  • Recap the last lesson by displaying true / false statements or multiple choice questions and asking students to answer on mini whiteboards.
  • Use Socrative or Kahoot to prepare a fun quiz or questionnaire.
  • Play a song relating to the lesson as the students arrive.
  • Display multiple choice questions around the room. Give the students a time limit (these classroom timers are fun) and get them to move around the room looking for and answering the questions.
  • Set up apparatus for the lesson and display one or more questions about what it might be for and how it works. Alternatively, hide the appartus under a cloth and, before revealing it, ask questions about what it might be.
  • When they arrive, hand each student or pair of students a mystery object and ask them to come up with ideas about what it might be used for.
  • Greet the students at the classroom door wearing full protective equipment including visor or goggles.
  • Hand each student a question or an answer to a question and ask them to find their pair.
  • Play the ‘Who Am I?’ game but instead of a famous person designate each student a key word relating to the current topic. Remember, participants can only use ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ questions to work out who or what they are.

No matter how you start the lesson try to involve the students whenever you can and make sure it does not go on for too long. Link the activity to the main body of the lesson and allow time for questions and answers. Have fun!

Google Forms for Flipped Learning

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I am a big fan of Google Classroom and although I am not completely paperless quite yet, I am increasingly using Google Docs in class and when setting assignments for homework.

I think one of my greatest discoveries when completing the Google Certified Educator courses (available here and highly recommended) was the fact that you can embed YouTube videos directly into a Google Form then share it with your students as a flipped learning activity. There are a variety of different question types available including text and multiple choice as well as more advanced options such as scales for ordering or sequencing.

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The students’ responses are automatically collated in a Google Sheet document allowing you to add comments, apply conditional formatting or review their learning before the lesson.

Conveyor Belt Sushi and the Circulatory System

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My students love sushi and there are a proliferation of conveyor belt restaurants in Bangkok. Not only do they serve delicious food but they also make an excellent model of the human circulatory system. Let me explain.

I usually start the lesson by showing the students five minutes of this video ‘Japanology – conveyor belt sushi’. I ask the students if they have ever been to this type of restaurant before and what they like about it. We discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of conveyor belt restaurants.

I then ask the students to imagine that they are running a conveyor belt sushi restaurant in Bangkok. The restaurant is really busy and there are lots of hungry customers waiting to be fed. They need to get the food to the customers more quickly. How do they do it? Allow a few minutes for the students to Think, Pair, Share. (e.g. tell the chefs to get a move on and increase the speed of the belt motor).

I then tell the students that empty plates are piling up but there are no waiters to collect them. How could they solve this problem without employing more waiting staff? (e.g. the customers should put their empty plates back onto the belt so that they are returned to the kitchen).

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At this point I tell the students that conveyor belt sushi restaurants are similar to the human circulatory system (this tends to be met with lots of ‘ohhs’ and ‘ahhhhs’ as they realise that I haven’t completely lost the plot by talking about sushi in Biology).

The students are asked to extend the analogy by comparing the parts of the restaurant with parts of the circulatory system using a comparison table or bridge maps (bridge maps are used to visualise analogies by quite literally bridging the gap between the familiar and the new. The line of the bridge shows the common relationship that exists between two or more pairs of things).

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The students should consider what each of the following represents in the human body and most importantly why (the relating factor):

  • The sushi (e.g. oxygen or nutrients);
  • The empty plates (e.g. deoxygenated blood);
  • The conveyor belt (e.g. blood vessels);
  • The chefs who prepare the food and put it on the plates (e.g. the lungs);
  • The motor which makes the belt go round (e.g. the heart);
  • The hungry customers (e.g. body cells).

Refer back to your opening questions about how best to get sushi to the hungry customers quickly and what to do with the empty plates. How does this relate to the circulatory system?

The activity should be extended by asking the students to evaluate the model. Are there any ways in which the comparison doesn’t quite work? Can the students think of any other ways of modelling the circulatory system?

This is a good lesson to have just before lunchtime because everyone gets very hungry!