Future Learning Blog

Last week I wrote about setting a homework challenge to learn muscles of the body as an online game - the students then had to post screen grabs on google+ to show they had done it and to be in contention for the hallowed prize of 'King of the Muscles' and a cafe voucher. I wasn't quite sure how it was going to go, but by Thursday the buzz in all my senior classes was about ' poke-a-muscle '.  The boys were so excited about it they'd post a score, and then find out that someone had beaten them, and then rush out of the class at interval to get to a computer and beat the top score.  I even had an email on Saturday (two days after the due date) from two boys who had been practicing and spent the afternoon working together to try and beat the original high scores they had submitted with the homework!!!

Competition is an important motivator, especially for teenage boys - so in the homework I set today I have included a bit of an incentive!

This is a guide for students after the teacher has used the gClass folders script to set up class sets of folders...... 1) Sign into your gisboyshigh.net account 2) Click on the Drive button at the top

On Wednesday last period I had my level 2 class for a student led training session.  As in all sessions so far in this unit I took photo's of the activities the boys were doing with my phone and at the end of the session I took a photo of the notes a non participant had made about what was done.  Immediately after the lesson I posted it all to my '12PD circle' so the boys could use it in their write ups and logs, I commented on some of the pictures about positives and negatives and tagged a few of them in pictures.   I wrote a blog post about this a couple of weeks ago.

If you use google apps at your school the calendar is an excellent tool to help with organisation and running of school events.  It is even possible to print it out for staff who are not too comfortable with using it online.  Here is a quick overview of what to expect when you open the calendar. 1) Log into google apps 2) At the top of the screen click on the 'calendar' word between 'drive' and 'sites', this will take you to a page like the one above.  Have a go at clicking between the different views, and see which one you