The IWB Challenge Week 1

As mentionned in a previous post, I (somewhat foolishly, I fear) decided to take up the IWB Challenge as set up by Jess McCulloch and also take up by me (of course) and Isabelle Jones from My Languages.
What a week to start off with! I think I was actually in my classroom, fully focused, for a day last week, I therefore have to admit to not being very adventurous at all. I did mage a few things, all of which were newish to me:

• On Monday I introduced clothing to my Yr7 bottom set. I used Powerpoint to introduce the clothes with their colours, like flashcards (not new) and then, as a plenary to see how much they had learnt I created another, more flashy Powerpoint. The slide transitions were all timed and there was music the started with the first slide and continued to the end, whilst on each slide there was a picture and a multiple choice of the correct sentence for them to pick. I know that to some this may be nothing new, but I only recently learnt how to do it (after having been taught by a wonderful colleague). The pupils seemed to like it too, the music seemed to keep them more focused on what they were doing, somehow!
• With the same class, the next lesson I used a flashcard powerpoint where puils had to click on a number, a picture appeared, told me what theyn thought the French work for it was and then they "flipped" the slide to see if it was correct - could have been quite effective, if somehow things hadn't got out of sync a bit in transfer from my lap to to my classroom computer :o(
• The only other thing I can think of is not very exciting, or new really. To revise European Countries with my Yr9 Set 3 German class, I got them to come and draw links from the German name of the country to where it was on the map. It was very interesting to see their knowledge of European geography (and lack of it), so they learnt where some European countries were (see, I even got in some cross-curricular links!)
  

The rest of the week was spent either in the computer suite or learning Japanese Calligraphy with Noriko, our Japanese Assistant.

I have some rather ambitious plans for using placeSpotting.com and MyStudiyo that Joe Dale blogged about earlier this week for next week. We shall see how it goes...