Mr. Jerrit's History teaching blog

My school rolled out Microsoft Teams to us in Summer 2018, and gave teachers the choice how far to use the new technology. All students were to be given a "Surface" laptop, but otherwise teachers were left to decide how far to adopt the new technology for the first year. Previously we had a "bring your own device" policy which  meant that some students worked on a laptop, but most had files with paper and KS3 had exercise books. Some staff (me included) were using Google Classroom, but there was no College-wide tech policy.  This seemed like progress. I decided to fully embrace the challenge so that all of my lessons would be done via Teams with all class work distributed via the Class Notebook. My rationale was that students would otherwise end up having some work on the virtual environment and some on paper in a folder or stuck into an exercise book; I wanted everything in one place. I also wanted to be working in one way for all my classes.  Needless to say, whe

I have other blog posts on the boil at the moment, but while I was thinking about it, I thought I would share a set of "Revision Grids" for the Edexcel IGCSE Germany Depth Study. I have given them out to Year 10 students as we have gone through the course - part of a lesson or homework has been to fill in part of them when we get to the end of a section. The intention is not for every fact to be included, but at least one (more is ideal) to help student to memorise the facts. I hoped it would help students to keep details in context. Many, if not all of these icons are used by me during teaching so the intention is that there is some recall of the learning that happened. I have also tried to highlight any causal links or thematic connections to help students see the link between factors, so that is also part of their learning too. Again - this has been a focus of my lessons and the students' classwork, so none of these ideas are new. I have been doing this sort of thing f