Introduction to Engrade from Engrade on Vimeo. A couple of years ago I decided to ditch my old fashioned teacher planner and use an Excel spreadsheet to record student grades. My reasons for doing this were twofold: firstly to enable me to filter each student’s grades by skill (listening, reading etc.) to identify where [...]
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This online magazine has a range of articles (some related to AQA prescribed topics, some not) but all of which are pretty interesting and should be accessible to the majority of students. Many of the articles also have audio versions too which students can use to help them with their listening skills.
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I suspect that most of you, like me, are thinking about what you can do after Easter to get your AS students ready for the exams. Last year I got my AS group doing translations on the 12 prescribed topics to help them revise the vocab and grammar at the same time and I think [...]
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With exams just around the corner students have started to ask me about revision sessions once they are on study leave. In the past when I have run such classes they have never been particularly well attended as students were reluctant to travel into College just for one class. This year I am [...]
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With the AS exams just around the corner (gulp) I have just produced a verb tense revision activity to be used at the end of my lessons over the next few weeks. I have used my favourite IWB tool ‘Triptico’ to create a list of common verbs (both regular and irregular) to be used alongside [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Last night I gave a CPD session on Teacher’s Report Assistant to some Colleagues and one of the tutors came up with a simple use for this tool that I hadn’t considered – using it to produce feedback on written work (especially for external assessment). For those of you who haven’t seen this brilliant tool [...]
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Getting students to use accents when word processing can be a bit of a challenge. I used to try to get my students to learn the necessary alt + gr codes but these can be fiddly to use on a laptop if you haven’t got a separate numerical keypad. Also, an increasing number of students [...]
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A colleague went on a conference last week and one of the ideas she came back with was a pass-the-parcel style activity involving students having to write their own exam style questions and their peers having to answer them. On a piece of scrap A4 paper each student writes down a question for somebody else [...]
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We always try to make lessons as engaging as we can for students with interactive starters, plenaries and collaborative working wherever possible, but sometimes, for reasons often beyond our control, it isn’t possible to prepare the lessons we would like to deliver in an ideal world. Last week I had planned a lesson with my [...]
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As somebody who currently teaches in a Six Form environment it often feels that a significant number of students begin to study A Level MfL without the necessary foundations on which to build. Out of the 30 AS students that I have this year (all of whom got A and B grades at GCSE), only [...]
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