Hello. My name's Elis Nunn and I'm a science teacher in a school in Wales
called Ysgol Uwchradd Aberteifi. Today I want to talk about what we provided
the pupils in the first few weeks of homeschooling. As a school and science
department we were planning fairly early on because we were pretty sure that
lockdown was imminent. We first identified the technical limitations
that we had. We weren't allowed to livestream so we needed to think of a solution.
And the two pieces of software we had
were Show My Homework and Microsoft Teams. We decided to set a scientific
investigation using PowerPoint.
I designed the slides with a few things in
mind. I wanted it to be clear and easy to follow. The expectations and outcomes for
the pupils were also very clear and there was a potential for some science
to be done at home. We titled this investigation the Jelly investigation
and it was aimed for key stage three.
What we did for each slide was we made
sure there's clear instructions so in this case they're being asked to
investigate how temperature and surface area affects a rate of dissolving
jelly cubes in water. Something we used which the whole school uses in each department
is a WAGOLL. Now a WAGOLL stands for what a good one looks like. And what it does is
it lets the pupil know what we expect of them. We use these in
classrooms and we felt it was perfect to use in a homeschooling situation.
Each slide had a WAGOLL so I'm going to give you an example now. So here is a research
WAGOLL and it's on a completely different topic so the pupils can't just
copy and paste the answers in, but it gives them a template and an idea of
what we expect of them. So what we did is is we provided an empty template with
some research questions they could answer. Now with this specific
investigation we were really keen for the pupils to try and do the experiments at
home, and we actually had a contingency plan in place if pupils could not do
that. For this one we did one for temperature and one for surface area so
they had to do two different plans for testing two different things.
And what we were really hoping was that the pupils had realised that to keep the
temperature the same for the surface area one and the surface area the same
for the temperature one. Some pupils may struggle to access
the equipment required to dissolve jelly, timer etc. We provided
them with data and what they could do with this data is produce some
high-quality scientific graphs.
Now one of the biggest challenges we had
was we wanted pupils to start making graphs digitally. What I provided was
a step-by-step slide on how you'd produce a scientific graph.
So hopefully you can see a video going on now where it's me explaining to the pupils how to
use Excel and how to produce a scientific graph. Once they'd
produced their Excel graph to then copy and paste that into the PowerPoint.
So I provided a section here in the analysis section where I've said place your bar graph here, place your line graph here.
I'm sure you can see by now that I'm following
the same pattern where I'm introducing a new section and providing them with
written instructions and a WAGOLL to show what the expectation is. So this
went on for the explanation, finally the conclusion. There was a WAGOLL for the
conclusion of further work. Again a template for them and once it was over,
there was just a little sort of summary saying thank you, well done, you've
completed the investigation.
To differentiate a little bit further and
try and push some pupils, we also offered them the opportunity to produce an
extension work. And the extension work was based on carbon dioxide dissolving
in oceans and what effect that might have on the ocean. The way we set the
work was very structured, on Show My Homework and on Microsoft Teams.
We want you to complete slides one to three today. This enabled pupils to structure
their work, because initially we noticed that some pupils were very keen to work
through the whole thing, but bearing in mind that they had other subjects going
on at the same time, but, of course, I think that was a good thing that they
were keen to complete the whole thing. And just on reflection, we had some
pupils produce some excellent work. Some had gone above and beyond.
Some had sent pictures of them conducting the experiment. Others had done the extension
work to a very high degree of quality. I'm just showing you the video I
produced and just basically the basics on how to add work and how to hand in.
And I think that really helped the pupils as well because initially the majority
of questions were IT related and not work-related, which was actually, I think,
a credit to our work or it told me that the pupils knew how to do
work in terms of the scientific content, it was just a few digital problems.
Overall we were really happy as a department with the quality of work
that was handed in and the general engagement we received.
Thank you for watching.
I really hope you found this useful and I wish you all the best with
your homeschooling endeavours.