Wordcount Website

Just for fun!

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is. Type in a word and discover how commonly we use it.

Don't use "Query Count" with pupils...

Listening at 5-14

Listening resources tend to be pretty thin on the ground. The LTS 5-14 English Language resource page has a few simple sheets which could be useful.

• You can find a reading/listening unit based on a short extract from Roald dahl's 'Boy' here.

• There is a listening exercise relating to genre identification here.

• The resources page also features sheets which pupils can complete after group discussion and class debate as evidence of listening.

If you want to view the whole page, you'll find it here.

Talking and Listening will be grouped together in the new outcomes, which will be published in the new year.

Writing using Mobile Phones in Class

John Gerard at Meldrum Academy has been making great use of the cameras on his pupils' mobiles to improve their writing. It's a really easy process (honest) which is fully explained below.

Working through a piece of writing in stages he follows modelling of, for example, an introduction, by asking his pupils to photograph their progress on their phones and send it to his computer via bluetooth. He then opens these files so that they display onto the whiteboard for class discussion before they move onto a new section. Here's one pupil's offering to let you see how it looks:

He adds comments from their discussion onto the screen and when the process is complete, pupils get a printout of a set of notes entirely produced by the class. This seems to me a superb way of involving pupils more in their learning, giving immediate feedback, encouraging peer-assessment and using technology relevant to pupils' lives. And let's not forget that they must love working this way!

You don't even need an interactive board for this, just a projector connected to a PC. One thing you will need though is a blutooth dongle like this one:

They cost around £5 and plug in to your PC just like a pen drive, allowing your PC to receive bluetooth messages. (they're a great thing to have to get your own mobile phone pictures onto your PC at home!)

to receive a file from a pupil, plug in the dongle and right click on the bluetooth icon on your desktop:

then ask the pupil to send the file to your PC using bluetooth. The PC will appear in their phone with it's network name, shown here in red.

You then select "receive a file" from the menu on your PC and follow the prompts to save the file to your computer. It would be a good idea to create a folder specifically for these images.

And that's it! Remember that the pupils will know how to do this much better than you already, so if you're not one of those control-freak teachers, let them help you and writing could become more fun and productive for everyone! Thanks to John for the instructions!

If you're doing something similar, leave a comment and let us know. If you give this a try, I'd love to hear about your progress.

English Inside the Black Box

You may well have read or heard of Black and Wiliam's "Inside the Black Box" which gathers together their findings on best practice in formative assessment, but have you seen this little gem? It's only twenty pages long, but I recently heard one PT describe it as "twenty pages of gold".

What I like about it most is that they begin by looking at the nature and aims of English teaching, and discuss the difficulties of assessing a subject which has two very different faces: the technical and the imaginative. The answer to this, Black and Wiliam decide, lies in the development of English teacher's judgements. This highlights the importance of frequent moderation and discussion.

They go on to look at the four main aspects of formative assessment which have been proved to raise pupil achievement and develop lifelong learners:

• Classroom talk (including questioning)
• Feedback
• Sharing learning intentions/ success criteria with the learner
• Peer and self-assessment

but before you sigh in memory of some whole-school AifL inset, they discuss these with relevant examples from the English classroom, and suggest many little things you might try to involve pupils more in their own learning.

Who currently does the most work in your lessons: you or the pupils? If the balance is all wrong, give one or two of the ideas in this little book a try.

There should be a copy in school, but if not you can obtain them at £5.00 each by emailing the publisher at:

information@nfer-nelson.co.uk

Leave a comment if you have any thoughts on this publication or can recommend any others...

Higher English Review

The SQA have announced that they are to review Higher English following concerns about the qualification. The main issues (which were raised following a survey of headteachers) are that pupils do not perform as well as predicted and that the exam is too narrow.

The review will look at the content of the exam but also how SQA share the requirements with teachers.

Read about it here, here and here.