Learning Activites

Group Brainstorm activity

Students work in a group building on from each other's ideas and writing down as much as they know. This an effective recap strategy that helps students feed information off each other to expand their answers.

KWL

What I know, What I want to learn, learnt. KWL worksheets can be used at the end of the beginning of a lesson. This type of formative assessment helps to distinguish various levels of understanding covering what they know and what they need to know weaknesses and strengths, this is beneficial as it helps to inform our future steps in terms of lesson design.

Mix and match definitions

Mix and match definitions is a quick formative assessment tool that can be used in groups or as individuals. A perfect way to do a warm up activity for the class so that they are able to refresh their memory with definitions and concepts learnt in previous lessons, this can also be used as a way to notify the teacher how much the students know.

Pictionary

Pictionary is a fun task that I used in my practicum that yielded great results. The whole class thoroughly enjoyed this activity, elements of competition, teamwork and content knowledge are incorporated as well as required to complete the task.

How to play: Within the game of Pictionary a member of a group is given a word, the word must be drawn into a picture that helps to describe what they have been told. Team members are to guess by means of interpretation and derivation of the drawing. Once this is achieved they must claim a new word from the teacher and eventually get down the list.

Continuum

Continuum’s is an easy formative assessment tool that can be manipulated in a variety of ways to help bring out knowledge, ideas, opinions and discussions from the participants. This can easily be set out in any class situation. It enables the participant to reflect on what they think is right and situate themselves accordingly.

Poster Design

Students are to design a poster around their given topic. This is a fun learning activity to help bring out their knowledge and can be structured in a way that requires the students to research their topic also. Students can potentially be asked to present their work in front of the class. This can be done on A4 or A3 sheets of paper as well as computer devices.

Daily Logs

Throughout the unit or year, students are to complete logs, these logs are to discuss how they are feeling about specific activities, discuss their development of ideas as they move through the course.

Courtroom Debate

Courtroom debate is an activity that requires participants to be highly critical. They get to act as lawyers who build up their defence or attack depending on what side they take. This task requires co-operation, leadership, critical thinking and so forth. Courtroom debate can be used as a way to teach students that all situations can be seen from multiple perspectives and understand that not everything is as clear-cut as it may seem. Students can choose controversial topics to discuss to increase levels of engagement. Courtroom debate also requires little to no equipment, but it can require good content knowledge (through means of research) or preparation.

Analyses of skits and scenarios

Analysing skits and scenarios is a great way to let students take charge and create a scenario based on your content. This enables the class to see a situation that is closely aligned to your theory lesson. As a class, you can freeze frame these scenarios and analyse what it is going on step by step to expand on with open-ended questions what they see it front of them. What is happening in this situation? What do you think? Is this bad? Is this good? Could this be done better? How does this person feel? And so forth.

Expert groups

Expert groups allow the students to work cooperatively to research their topics. As an end goal, the expert groups will break off and teach their original group about their given topic. This teaches students about why it’s important to take leadership in their role so that they can benefit their own students as much as possible. Everyone has a responsibility, everyone has to be engaged which a good example of positive interdependence.

Case study review and analyses

Case study reviews allow the class to analyse a given scenario and determine possible outcomes (divergent discovery). This can be associated with any given scenario, problem-solving, health, physical. It teaches the students about empathy, what it’s like to be in someone else's shoes and to think about their perspective on different situations. A great tool to let students review a situation and problem-solve with the knowledge they may already have in addition to becoming critical.

Reading Reviews and discussions.

Reading reviews is another learning activity that requires 2 things, that students engage with the readings you have set for the class and secondly that they are able to understand the content enough to discuss it. If they don’t understand the content the discussion part of this may help to deepen their understanding of the text.

Video Reviews

Video reviews or analyses is similar to the tasks written above, however, it requires less preparation time as you can quickly grab relevant videos to your content for students to review. You can also show the class as a whole a particular video and freeze frame it having discussions about what is going on to deepen their understanding.

Speed dating

Students are to have one-on-one time with another participant discussing the content they have been given, or what they have previously learnt etc. After a short time frame students are to rotate to another person they haven’t met before also discussing their given content. This is a perfect way for students to see and work with different students they haven’t worked with before in addition to learning about different perspectives. It’s a great way to keep the classroom engaged about the content and discover knowledge through avenues aside from the teacher.

Peerwise

Peerwise is a platform that allows students to design questions that orientates around content. Students answer and provide feedback on these questions to help their learning. This traditionally is used in university environments however, it is good to note as a resource for a class that may be eligible to use this type of learning platform.

-Health promotion

Piazza

Piazza is platform similar to peerwise that enables students to design questions or ask questions that other people in the class can freely answer. This can be used to set up for assignments or assessments if any of the students are unsure about specific aspects of content. Generally, if a student asks a question this tends to help other people within the classroom who also want to know the answer.

Plickers

Students are given specific cards that are associated with their name. When students hold up these plickers card this will add points to a database distinguishing if they got the answer correct or wrong. This will later come up and show the weaknesses and strengths of the classroom as it totals their scores. This an effective formative assessment tool that can be used to help distinguish which students are struggling and those who know the content

Analyses of skits and scenarios

Analysing skits and scenarios is a great way to let students take charge and create a scenario based on your content. This enables the class to see a situation that is closely aligned to your theory lesson. As a class, you can freeze frame these scenarios and analyze what it is going on step by step to expand on with open-ended questions what they see it front of them. What is happening in this situation? What do you think? Is this bad? Is this good? Could this be done better? How does this person feel? And so forth.

Expert groups

Expert groups allow the students to work co-operatively to research their topics. As an end goal, the expert groups will break off and teach their original group about their given topic. This teaches students about why it’s important to take leadership in their role so that they can benefit their own students as much as possible. Everyone has a responsibility, everyone has to be engaged which a good example of positive interdependence.

Case study review and analyses

Case study reviews allow the class to analyse a given scenario and determine possible outcomes (divergent discovery). This can be associated with any given scenario, problem-solving, health, physical. It teaches the students about empathy, what it’s like to be in someone else's shoes and to think about their perspective on different situations. A great tool to let students review a situation and problem solve with the knowledge they may already have in addition to becoming critical

Reading Reviews and discussions.

Video Reviews

Spinning wheel/Game Show

In groups students are to come up with a team name and give it to the teacher. This will be placed on the spinning wheel. A question will be asked and from here each group must research potential answers. The wheel is spun and whoever it lands on has to answer the question. A point system is in place and thus those who answer correctly gain 10 points, if they cannot answer they can pass but the team who buzzes in a gets the correct answer only get 5 points. 5 deducted if there is cheating or answers are incorrect, an additional 5 points is deducted if they are not paying attention or going against rules. This concludes once a team has achieved 100 points (can be modified).

Formative assessment tools

Kahoots

(https://create.kahoot.it/#user/8c7ef619-58de-4f7a-a5a5-a8ef0e47ad6f/kahoots/created)

Kahoots is a formative assessment tool that can be used at the beginning of the lesson or at the end. This is dependent on how you’ve designed/structured the lesson and is an effective way to indicate various levels of learning.The colours, upbeat and positive music in addition to the element of competition; yields great participation and interest, drawing out knowledge in a non-conventional way. Kahoots can be designed specifically so that it is relevant to the learning of your subject area. (images here, of downloads etc)

Padlet

(https://padlet.com/my/dashboard)

Padlets is another formative assessment tool that requires more than just recall. This website was used during my practicum to provide a platform for the students to transcribe their ideas. The ability to see what other participants have written enables the class to feed different points of knowledge off of each other consequently extending their ideas. The class can be anonymous benefiting those who don’t feel confident in contributing.

Google forums.

Google forums is a way of formative assessing information that students know or have learned. This variation can be designed and transformed into information that can be turned into graphs.

Thumb Gauge

Thumb gauge is a quick and easy formative assessment tool which can be used in a class at any time to inform how the students are feeling at the time. The universal tools that a thumb can indicate being thumbs down, thumbs up and thumb to the side can easily be picked up by any year level.

Socrative.

Is a tool to design questions for students to answer. Students can sign in with their devices and answer a series of questions related to your content. This will be given to a data base for the teacher to assess later and to differentiate how well the students know the content of your lessons. This can be used at the beginning as a comparison to before and after or at the end of a unit before a test.