That Blue Square Thing

Teacher Resources

It turns out that I occasionally either have some good ideas or steal ideas off of someone else.

If you're interested in mailmerging exam board marksheets, there's some stuff on the iMedia markgrids page that might be of interest. If you're looking for a way of monitoring time spent on exam board assessments, there's a spreadsheet on the WJEC Unit 2 page that might be helpful.

Sometimes those things are connected to a geography or computing in a clear way - in which case they will be in the right sort of place. At other times the idea or thing is pretty general. In which case it might end up here (or linked from here).

The Only Connect stuff is on the Only Connect page as there's quite a lot of it so it gets its own page.

What do you Know grids

This is an idea from some TEEP training. Allegedly it went down rather well with persons in suits as it allowed even the dimmest suit to realise that people have been making progress - if you're worried at all about what suits think. Of course, the suits might or might not be interested in this anymore (depending on what way the wind is blowing today), but I've left it here for interest - and at some point I'm sure they'll change their minds again and go back to this.

The original version of this used actual post-it notes place on a basic grid (I think it might have had an extra box somewhere on it). That makes it easily reusable - well, assuming you have an infinite supply of post-it notes (hint: try History departmental stores. They usually have all sorts of useful stuff in them...).

You can then use the grids in all sorts of different ways.

PDF iconWhat do you Know grid - PDF version for people without Word

MS Word iconWhat do you Know grid - a Word version so you can use the idea (but feel free to link people back to here by all means...)

MS PowerPoint iconWhat do you Know slides - Noel Jenkins produced these in 2014 and sent them to me. In 2021 I got around to putting them on here... They're some slides you could use in class to go with the activity.

Using post-its has the advantage that you can get the kids to stick their questions up on a wall and then use them as the basis for following lessons - which is probably quite a good idea generally.

Some Game Show bits and bobs

MS PowerPoint iconMillion Pound Drop - a minor hack of a PowerPoint made by Paul Sturtivant over at the SLN forum which will allow a short million pound drop set of questions to be run. Perhaps as one of those plenary things.

The idea is all Paul's, all I did was tweak it a little and embed the music rather than link it to a file. The music came from YouTube so I guess it must be copyright free as otherwise it wouldn't be on YouTube...

The Powerpoint seems to work in all versions as far as I can tell. The money isn't draggable - although I could probably solve that if I tried hard enough. The sound will play in versions of PowerPoint from 2007 onwards it seems (and it'll play automatically and it should be embedded), including for Macs.