Teacher says to class "you can watch this dvd whilst i prepare some work for the Ofsted review" reported her to head - agree?

[SexyDomesticatedDad]

Title probably says it all - just back from holidays and the secondary school is told it has an Ofsted inspection later that week. DS 2 comes home and reports they were allowed to watch Simpsons DVD during a lesson for above reason. Apparently teacher is quite newly qualified but thats no excuse right?

Good post Raven - spot on.

LOL at combustible's "which episode?"

Message withdrawn

Mindmaps are mmy keep the buggers quiet activity.

I'm currently liking 'double bubbles'.

You do a mindmap on, say, a character of your choice from 'Of Mice & Men'. Then you do another one on another character.

THEN you do a summative one with both characters - Crooks on left page, Curley's wife on right, similarities over the staples, differences in the margins.

& voila - painless 'compare & contrast' essay plan.

raven tell me how I would do that to contrast Christian images of God with those of Aristitotle.

raven, I loves ya tonight

When I did my PGCE, videos were very much frowned upon. There is no way I would show a video as a student, and even when qualified, I don't think I put one on until the summer term. I still feel a cheat if I show a video. Maybe I had a freaky PGCE tutor, but the attitude has stayed with me.

Now, I occasionally show clips. We have 2-hour lessons and it is helpful to break them up. I am happy that there is Youtube with 3-4 minute offerings.

As for babysitting, I think, if done properly, videos don't deliver.

If I want to show a clip from Youtube, I may have to look at 10 clips before I find the right one. If I was showing something longer, eg a David Attenborough natural history programme, I would have to watch it first, come up with a list of questions and watch it again to validate them - all before the lesson. If the objective of the video was to free up my time, it would be a false economy. If it truly freed up time, it meant that it hadn't been watched beforehand or questions prepared - bad news.

The easiest way to babysit them is, honestly, to give them a test. They'll be quiet for 30 minutes before getting restless.

But then you have to mark it squeakypop!

I agree often I find a lesson with a video takes longer to plan so would be a daft time saving operation. I use you tube all the time.

Swap papers, FM?

Oh I wish. It all has to be levelled and whatnot. Poor kids can't even do a poster (another old standby ) without me having to mark it, point out how they could improve their level, them do it again, me re-mark it...

Bloody hell twinset, it's Friday night, we should both be getting merrily pissed not discussing Aristotle!

OK, you draw a thing that looks a bit like an aerial view of 5 cowboys peeing in a bucket (central circle, 5 circles connected to it). Everyone (or 'A's of pairs) writes Aristotle in the 'bucket' - images of God on the 'cowboys'.

'B's meanwhile do the same for Christian images of God.

You can obviously pair up abler/less able students & give more able the trickier task, which I'm guessing in this instance would be Aristotle.

Then you have a diagram which is two big circles, with (say) 4 little circles in between them - lines connecting - those are for similarities, & another 4 little circles which are just connected to 'Aristotle', & 4 which are just connected to 'Christian'. It looks like 2 spiders holding hands 4 times iyswim...

Each pair agree which beliefs are common to both (holding hands) & which are one only (free hands).

They then number the similarities in order of priority (first half of essay) & then the differences (second half of essay).

You can use the diagrams on an interactive whiteboard - draw one, scan it in, scribble on it yourself or get students to. You can then print blank versions off to save initial faffing about drawing circles etc.

Once they get their heads round it, you can move away from it 'having' to be a set number of points - students can have however many 'cowboys' or legs' they judge the task needs.

thanks raven will give that a go.

Where did you get it from or have you made it up.

Kids at our school a re fab you can do anything with them.

Nicked it off our English AST. She's in love with them - if we had zombies AND vampires battering the school door down, she'd be insisting we double bubbled them. 'OK class, so BOTH are undead - but will garlic work on a zombie?'

They are effective, though - it's really addressed our problem of kids being spoonfed coursework due to pressure from SLG to achieve unrealistic grades, so then they have NO idea how to plan an exam response...

I think I may have done something similar with bubbles, stars and a big circle. Used it to compare Hinduism, Sikhism and Islam, Big circle they wrote things they share, stars are things shared between 2 and bubble thing unique to one.