Niamh Bland is using songs and music to secure key pieces of vocabularly in students' minds...this is an idea that I've borrowed and used with my Year 7s this week - creating a song/rap/poem to help memorise key information about Shakespeare.
Danielle Silvey shared her idea to support students in considering both sides of the argument, using visual "hands" to encourage students to separate their thinking with a key issue.
Danielle has laminated copies of these to use in lessons, so students can write ideas on to plan the answer and then rub them off when finished, ready to reuse in another lesson.
John Shepherd has been using "Prezis" with Y9 (instead of websites) and Y12 (as a revision aid for a unit)..
Here is an example of how the website can be used by Sophie Y12…
http://prezi.com/1bus8_uov2vd/ict-415
Emily Smith shared this visual aid to help with planning for an essay - an idea that could be adopted in other subjects, with different key pointers in the white boxes...
Revision & Exam Preparation Tips from Elizabeth Lockwood
For your A level groups in particular, my tip would be to collect a variety of text books, preferably really old ones because:
they will have far more detail than the modern crop of text books that are written to a specific syllabus, so they will enrich your repertoire of background knowledge for when you are teaching groups who like a story
the language used models the answering technique needed for 5 - 25 mark answers: (e.g. PEE and DEAL).
there will be a book for every different type of learner in your group, with a wide variety of books there is no excuse for not doing the background reading.
obsolete books contain primary and secondary sources which can be woven into new analysis activities in lessons.
the diagrams and pictures are in black and white, so much easier to scan.
the images are referenced, which makes checking validity easier than images available via Google.
old books are often used by the people setting the exam questions (they were new books when examiners were training, they are familiar with the content). In Biology, but we have a high score rate for seeing old examples of genetics and photosynthesis turning up in new exam papers.
pick your time and these treasures can be yours for 1p plus postage, less than the cost of a latte.
my precious treasury of examples dates from 1977, it is very old and battered and the best preparation for university ever printed. Faisal reckons the examples from there were harder than anything he was asked to do in his first term Kings.
Dan Spencer is using active carousel activities to make revision more engaging and structured for students. He is also trialling different planning techniques with Danielle Silvey...more to follow on this :)
Jonny Tarrant has used an innovative way of challenging top set thinking skills by asking students to engage in a debate, justifying the rank order of evil...
Jonny has also been stretching the more able through an innovative use of critical thinking puzzles...
