Day 9 - Online school

Thursday 26 March 2020

Possible until proven impossible!

Today I was in the mood for a couple of new experiments on the gorunds that I thought things would be impossible until proven impossible. I am pleased to say that I have no such proof for either - yet! I confess I am starting to get a bit cagey today though. Grateful that we have some outside space to retreat to, the cage is virtual really - glued to to the old screen.....


What happened today?

Speakers corner - Last year, under the guise of my role as ToK teacher, I started a 'Speakers' corner at aschool. The details of the idea can be read about here. The basic idea is pretty simple though. Students take turns to stand on a soapbox and tell us about something. We have all sorts from songs to recitals to speeches to rants, monologues and more. It has been a great addition! Of course, the challenge was to see if this could be done virtually. Thanks to three brave students who volunteerd to record their 'thing' and post it on you tube, the answer is yes! SO I sent out the iadvery as usual this morning and then at 13.45 -  Speakers' corner time I sent out the e-mail with the links! Simple really, but kind of satisfying. The videos have had loads of vies which tells me loads of people watched - well done students - some other normality continues....

Human Loci - This is one of my favourite activities of the year  - Human Loci - and it was scheduled for this week! There in lying todays other challenge. Typically we go in to. large space and I ask students to be the points on the loci that I define. 'Eevrybody stand the same distance away from this chair as me' for example. It then gets nice and dynamic whe I star moving and moving the objects.. I recreated that in a google draw file. I grabbed the headshots of the students on our VLE and put them all on the page. The students all moved their own image around and it was surprisingly effective. I did have a couple of miscreants which threatened to spoil things, but sense prevailed. I am also pretty sure I had a parent in my lesson today who was trying to draw shapes that represnetd the lcoi in the back ground... that was kind of weird! Still, I get a repeat lesson tomorrow, so I will try again..

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