Wonderwall

Categories: s1 and s2, Advanced Higher, Glaciation
I have been wanting to use wallwisher in class for a long time. When I first saw this tool, I immediately thought that it would be a great way for students to collaborate around a topic and I liked the way that it had been used before an education conference that I followed through twitter and blog postings. As it's only compatible with recent internet browsers, I couldn't really demo it at school, but having got round that problem, I'm trying it out with two classes tomorrow as a homework. With s1, we will shortly be looking at the rainforest, and I would like them to bring a little to the table before we start the topic. I'm posting a wall for the students to share facts. I will be asking that they limit the time that they research the topic to ten minutes, after which time they must be prepared to share at least on fact that they did not know beforehand. Students can't duplicate each others facts, so there is also an incentive to do the homework early. I'm also going to ask them to credit their source. That way, they are also getting into a good habit regarding plagiarism- in early years at high school, the copy and paste is used far too often.
For Advanced Higher, I set aside the Monday double period for folio work, of which the issues essay is a part. I have found that initially, students can find it quite difficult to establish exactly how they should be critiqueing a source, and get bogged down in trying to make the author out as a liar! For this, I am using wallwisher and posting an article that a student of mine used last year in their final submission. It is by Nigel Lawson and is full of inaccurate science, political agenda, exaggeration and contradiction. For that reason, it's a good starting point! I'm asking my students to fill the wall with comments to show examples of exaggeration, bias, emotive language and challengeable conclusions. I think it's easier to get the views of a number here and see where it takes us in our discussions. I would hope that breaking the source down like this will make it much easier to do in future on their own.
Wallwisher, I think, has an amazing range of possibilities for the classroom. Some colleagues and I have been collaborating on a wall to highlight some possibilities. If you are a teacher and can think of a way in which you have used or would like to use it, perhaps you would like to contribute your ideas to our collection here or above. Many thanks in advance.
Finally, I will be relying on my crutch in times of crisis, classtools, to enliven the s3 period tomorrow. Similar to wallwisher, there is a post-it function, and I'd like to use it with images as a background to ask students to locate possible land use conflicts within a landcsape by dragging the post-its and explaining the issue. I'm thinking of an image of a honeypot town, one of a popular walkers route, and one of a hydro scheme. Unlike the work with wallwisher, I'll be looking for submissions in pairs, as I want to get a better idea of knowledge gaps (not enough laptops for one each unfortunately).