Revision is just an echo coming back to you...

Categories: Population

I'm sure there are several, but I would say two of the things which might frustrate my students about me are a) my lack of patience and b) appearing to be trying something for the sake of trying it. If I expand on this, I often use new sites/applications/ideas in class but then when other things (e.g. course timelines) become more important, I lose patience with these and move on to something else. This might lead to students thinking 'Why did we do this in the first place?' as they sometimes don't get the opportunity to finish their work. This is not always the case. There are several examples on this blog and elsewhere where we have successfully taken ideas from start to finish, but as this trait is something which frustrates me myself, I can only imagine those I teach feel the same.

It is with this in mind that I'm coming back to Woices. I have been looking at this site for a while now and watched as others have explored its uses in class. I have thought of a couple of half ways in which I could use it, but feared the outcome above. I'm now coming round to a use for Population. Here goes:

Introduce idea in class of 'A walk across a crowded world' . Where would you go? What makes these areas people magnets. Is it always by choice that people locate here? Again, I'd have the google earth population layer on and spinning for reference. Let class brainstorm topic for a few minutes and collect feedback. Write locations on pre-cut paper. Similarly, ask class to consider 'Exploring the Empty lands'. Same idea and processes. We would then have a collection of locations to consider which could be redistributed around the class.

Second part, introduce homework task where students research assigned location for further reasons for population density. One week should still be enough even though the NAB is on Wednesday. Students to create a summary of the reasons that, when spoken, should not exceed one minute. Show students woices and tell class about concept of a 'walk'.

Third part-recording echoes. Once these are all collected (probably a couple of weeks time), I should be able to embed these here and students can follow the 'walks' as an alternative way to revise the topic. Depending on success I'll display the results. If, for some reason I don't, I'll write up why.