BBC Bitesize Daily

[crawdad]

Urgh ... I just watched the BBC's new daily educational programme on iPlayer for my son's age group (13 - 14, aka year 8). Words can"t express how bad it was. And very short too ... though, given the quality, that's probably a good thing.

p.s. A link to the programme ... www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p089r9br/bitesize-1314-year-olds-week-1-1-maths-english-and-history

We got a text from school last night saying that we should now start looking on to BBC bitesize daily for work instead of having stuff from the teachers. I was dreading a really generic approach and content for the next 6 weeks or so.

Luckily though teachers have been very active on Teams today and posted lost of work and assessments for the next two weeks so I'm relieved about that.

Just watched that, think its meant for year 9 too, it's really bad. The Oak Academy ones are far better. The BBC presenter was using incorrect English in the English lesson and the work seemed way below year 9 level. We've done 2 lessons from Oak National Academy and both excellent quality.

The ditzy presenter was annoying and did that stereotypical "oh, I'm so bad at maths" thing that maths teachers are always at pains to warn parents against.

The "why is this maths important" film just covered basic examples of negative numbers without even attempting to cover on why you might want to multiply them together.

The whole show just seemed like a pointless advert for the Bitesize website (which is generally pretty good quality).

Oak Academy is really good, we did science Maths and English today, the quality is quite good.

try www.blutick.com

free of charge

DD's school have recommended Oak Academy. Apparently it has been put together by teachers. We haven't looked at it yet though.

Can parents just access Oak Academy directly themselves? I thought the children's teachers were supposed to set tasks on there and direct us to it?

Ignore my previous message. I have just looked at the Oak Academy website and it looks like parents can just access it directly from what I saw!

I thought they were awful too! I only looked because a few of the parents were raving about them on a whatsapp group

Ive been using the Oak Academy this week and think its really good. I watched all of the primary bbc bitesize programme today and thought it was awful too!

I watched the 9-11 one - and putting years 5 and 6 together not very helpful when you really need something for a year 6 who is pretty up to speed on everything and believes that he is at mastery level (and I have no reason to think he's wrong though I'm no teacher!) - and also a year 7 one and wasn't very impressed. The history content seemed very dull and dry. They've read and watched some Horrible Histories in the past and I'm hoping to get DS2 to watch more of those programmes. With the jokes and songs and other silliness, and why not really, I get the sense that there is stuff to draw on about history being how you research things, about drawing conclusions about the facts from evidence and interpreting it - which is much more useful for studying history or any other subject further than reeling off a string of dates leading up to the Battle of Hastings. DS2 has also been reading aloud to us from Michael Morpurgo books - I chose the first one for having a picture of a cat on the cover as I thought that would get his attention. He chose the second. But it turns out that both are historical novels with stuff about different people coming across each other and also the feline characters, and there's lots there to play with and talk about, particularly if I can get him to forget that I'm trying to coerce him into doing "school" stuff and just chat with me about what's interesting.

I come from a family of proper academic historians - I'm not an academic myself but I enjoy reading and talking about history - I'm also not a teacher - just an opinionated parent.

We do like the look of these BBC resources, which are clips from the BBC back catalogue that have been mapped to the curriculum by Key Stage. I showed them to my DC today and he seemed moderately enthusiastic so hopefully he'll browse through and watch a few this week: www.bbc.co.uk/teach/secondary/zkqp47h

I say "hopefully" because he's taking an independent approach to his learning ... working through his school resources methodically as far as I can tell, but certainly doesn't like me looking over his shoulder or getting overly involved (apart from trouble shooting the frequent IT issues! ).

ds and I followed an Introduction to Higher Chemistry online session last week on Scholar (Scottish curriculum, login provided by our school) and it said if using the BBC Bitesize pages for Scotland be careful as they are out of date with the changes made to the SQA courses in 2018.

Not sure if the GCSE/A'Level BBC Bitesize content is more up to date. Obviously it is still educational and mostly relevant but might not be completely in line with current syllabus.

We watched the first 12-13 one today. It was so awful, mainly because of the presenter.

She could not have been less interested in the teaching.

Am I doing these wrong? We watch the 20 minute lesson which is broadly split into 3 topic areas. But then the three lessons & resources released on the same day are not about the same topics? I thought they would be complementary but there doesn’t seem to be much read across.

The Oak National site is different again - some of the videos seem very repetitive and without watching the videos beforehand in their entirety it’s hard to get a sense of what they will contain as there is no summary.

Having said all that - I’m very grateful for all these resources to draw on - some are very engaging.