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The great water experiement


Regular readers will know that I've been experimenting with ways to encourage students to use and, more importantly, interact with blogging. My first real attempt is a project that challenged Year 10 students to reduce the amount of water the consume. I am pleased that there are now 41 comments on the post! I especially appreciate those of you who have added your own comments. These have made Year 10 feel like they are writing to a real audience!


I am pleased that the classes have posted again afetr the two week period to report on any reduction. However, as I left the task fairly open ended, most comments don't go into how difficult (or easy!) reducing their water use was. This is something that I will need to improve, especially as the next attempt (the carbon project over on the KS3 blog) will be with Year 7. I'll need to come up with some sort of guidance sheet.


I'll end with an example of what I want to achieve. This comment was left by a pupil:


'I think I reduced my water amount a lot by turning off the tap when brushing my teeth and only putting the dishwasher on when it's full.Convincing my family wasn't so easy, my step-dad muttered about Global warming increasing the rain fall and then causing an Ice age so we shouldn't worry about saving less water...'


This comment will allow a discussion to take place! It also raises the question of whether we should be following linear Schemes of Work. Since the project kicked off we have moved onto looking at Shanty Towns. I plan to use a lesson next week to explore the feedback left on the blog. Hopefully this will allow pupils to evaluate and explore the issue further.

Comments

  1. Anonymous6 October 2007 at 15:18

    Your dad should think of the polar bears being killed! Well done for using less water though

    ReplyDelete

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