gcse
What’s the question?
Feb 27th
An essay word cloud using wordle. The question was 'How effective was Elizabeth's government?'
Imagine how frustrating life would be if no one answered your questions:
Which way is the train station? A train station is a building where trains depart from.
How much is this coat? A coat is something that you wear to keep you warm and dry.
However, every year a surprising number of students fail to answer the questions set in exams. One of the key features of a good essay is a clear and consistent focus on the question. A good essay doesn’t just describe a topic, it answers the question.
An easy way to ensure that you are focused on the question is to use the words from it. That is one of the reasons that teachers are always reminding students to highlight or underline the key words in exam questions. www.wordle.net is a free online tool that can help you to reflect on the answers that you write. It takes all the words from your answer and puts them into a ‘word cloud’: the more you have used a word the bigger it appears.
The end of apartheid
Jan 6th
Tonight hundreds of people took part in a torchlit procession through Bristol to mark the release of the worlds most famous prisoner. (BBC television news, February 1990)
I have collected together a range of sources looking at the end of apartheid in South Africa. The aim is to help GCSE students (14-16 years old) to think about the relative importance of the different people, groups, and factors which played a part in the end of white minority rule. I’m still looking for some more sources, for example the Lusaka Manifesto, but the sources gathered so far can be seen on the ‘apartheid’ pages.
Britain 1900-1918
Dec 20th
I have gathered together a series of links to BBC resources to help students to revise for the OCR Paper 2 exam in the summer. These include short video clips from the excellent BBC learning zone archive, as well as links to BBC Bitesize notes. They can be found here.
The site itself is starting to come together again. One issue I have found is with font size. However, if you take your mouse to the top right of the window it gives the option to increase or decrease this. I think the next big project will be on Mandela and apartheid – after all, it is our new controlled assessment!