I Should Be Marking

On The Blog of Mr. C the other day was a mention of something called a Thunk. A Thunk is basically a pilosophical question with no right or wrong answer - is a broken down car the same as a parked car? If I read part of a comic book in a shop, am I stealing?

I have shamelessly stolen the link with over a hundred Thunks on and have started using them on my tutor group first thing in a morning to get them woken up. I may also use the themed registers idea posted in the comments by Jude.

I also decided to expand my pupil blogs and now have a dedicated Thunks blog on there. Each fortnight (or so, depending on how busy the blog becomes) I’ll post a new (or shamelessly ripped ofF) Thunk for people to discuss. I’ve also press ganged and/or spammed a few forums, friends and colleagues (including a Philosophy teacher who couldn’t get away until he promised to get his class to join in next week).

Please join in the discussion and we’ll see where our Thunks will take us

A few weeks ago I set up a class blog for a group of 20 or so Year 7 pupils. We took a lesson out of our Scheme of Work to look at some example pupil blogs and then posted about who we are, what we like about ICT, etc. For homework the pupils blogged about their favourite ICT lessons ever, and a pleasing number of them were about recent lessons since the move to secondary school.

I posted around a couple of forums and newsgroups in order to raise some interest and quite a few people came along, read the posts and left some comments (if you are among them then thank you).

This week we got back to our current topic of PowerPoint Presentations. Not a fantastic topic but a simple start and good for a baseline. We are also researching wild animals at the same time so it’s not ‘All About Me’ as dictated by the Nat Strat (I took the line that after 11 years they had probably already figured out who they are and what their favourite colour is). The plan now is to pick two pupils per week and get them to take a photo or two of the lesson and then blog about it. You can see the first such blog at http://tinyurl.com/y9codl (apologies, I can’t seem to post links today).

I must admit I badly under-estimated the time required to do this and will make sure I give the the kids a little longer next week.

Next week we’ll probably stick to the ICT lesson and then start thinking about expanding to other subjects. You never know, I might even learn something about whaty goes on in my own school.