Woldingham School Remote Learning Issue 2

15 May 2020

Teaching & learning continues to thrive from our virtual Woldingham Mr William Bohanna, Senior Teacher (Teaching & Learning) At the end of our fourth full week of remote learning, I wanted to take another opportunity to shine a spotlight on activities across academic departments to provide an insight into what this means for students and teachers in reality. This week we’re taking a look at design and technology, classics, economics & business studies, psychology, mathematics and physics. We’ll focus on other departments in the coming weeks

Design and Technology – Creativity at home ‘You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have’, Maya Angelou.

Right from the start, the DT department’s ‘WhatsApp’ group has been buzzing non-stop with exciting ideas of how to provide interesting and engaging learning remotely, agreeing early on to include practical elements and to continue to deliver the skills planned for the summer term.

With work adapted for on-line learning, younger students are analysing stakeholders and generating design iterations through modelling and sketching. Students have been very creative in sourcing materials from around their ‘lockdowned’ homes.

Year 7 students have been adjusting packaging nets and generating a range of branded design proposals for packaging cutlery for airlines. Students in Year 8 have been equally excellent in their approach to designing a promotional point of sale display for a local business. Real client feedback will be given remotely this year in online Dragon’s Den style presentations towards the end of the term.

Both Year 9 and Year 10 have been exploring organic modelling, sketching and CAD. These areas have presented the most challenge working remotely but have been the most rewarding.

Several students tried making the DT departmental ‘pastry recipe’ (expertly demonstrated by Head of DT Mr Wahab) as an alternative to modelling clay to produce their 3D designs.

Very quickly, students were able to move to the next challenge of working through the instructional on-line videos on organic sketching. And as students were not able to access our industry standard CAD package remotely, they relished the challenge of learning a new online CAD package (www.tinkercad.com) to present their designs.

15 May 2020

Year 11 and Lower Sixth have been developing their abilities to analyse products objectively using a range of different techniques. DT teacher Mrs Wilkinson’s product analysis videos of a Dyson vacuum cleaner provided a thorough explanation, and students are now working on video responses.

Classics - Cambridge Schools Classics Project It is said that Latin a dead language, but it has never been more alive at Woldingham, even under lockdown.

Year 7 and 8 students are being encouraged to become independent learners. Through Teams, students are set a range of tasks which support students who are less confident and stretch those who are well on their way to mastery. Students work at their own pace, using superb online resources provided by the Cambridge Schools Classics Project and are encouraged to review their own work.

OneNote allows us to transform the classic gap fill translation by distributing recorded answers alongside the task. The rapid communication between teachers and students through Teams ironically makes us even more available to answer individual questions despite being in different places (and countries).

Classicists in the Sixth Form have been at the cutting edge of digital learning for a long time. Here we encourage students to collaborate, learning not only about Greek and Roman society but also building teamwork skills they will need in at work. Groups of students are able to work together on the same document at the same time enhancing even a simple task like taking notes. Agreeing a shared set of notes requires the group to challenge each other’s thinking and justify their ideas. Being able to pull in material from texts, images, websites and videos makes the end product far richer than pen and paper. Finally, because teachers can see the page of notes evolving as students work, we can instantly add comments, highlight key points or direct students to consider deeper aspects of the topic.

15 May 2020

Economics & Business Studies - Marketing models from home…

What do a bag of Doritos, an X-Box, a box of cereal and a camera have in common? They are all items used by our students to illustrate and explain important business concepts from home.

Having students at home, surrounded by a household full of products, can be quite a boon for a business teacher and students have been sent on scavenger hunts around the house to find items they can use to demonstrate their understanding of marketing strategy.

A loaf of bread was used as a product that might need to adopt a penetration pricing strategy to attract trial purchase in a highly competitive market, whilst Apple Airpods were held up as a product that would pursue a price skimming strategy to ‘cream off’ consumers willing to pay top dollar for highly anticipated products.

Mr Abbott got stuck in too, rooting around the kitchen for a box of cornflakes to explain an ‘extension strategy’ in the product life cycle … or he might just have been eating his breakfast.

Psychology - Split-brain research Remote learning has provided an opportunity to undertake independent research. This term Lower Sixth students have been studying biopsychology. Students completed a diagram of functional areas of the brain and looked at the case of Gabby Giffords, an American congresswoman who was shot at point blank range but went to make an amazing recovery. We have also watched footage of split-brain research including localisation of language production.

Year 11 students have been learning about non-verbal communication including the bee waggle dance and are now looking at the structure of the brain.

15 May 2020

Mathematics - Mathematics for architects, engineers and manufacturers Woldingham mathematicians are attaining new and lofty heights in their pursuit of grasping mathematical skills and concepts. Marden year groups are climbing their way through types of number and graphs. While Year 9 and 10 students are discovering there is no greater joy than being able to apply trigonometry to triangles. Mathswatch, MyMaths and videos produced by our own excellent staff are educating, enlightening, instructing and consolidating these incredible techniques – used by architects, engineers and manufacturers the world over.

Our intrepid Year 11 students are polishing up their skills and techniques in preparation for A Level and working on their own research projects investigating ‘Using a global event or situation: How has the use of mathematics informed government policy and decision making and/or reporting in the media’. For anyone interested in knowing more, check out BBC iPlayer: Horizon Coronavirus special with Hannah Fry for a relevant example of maths at work in this way.

Lower Sixth students have immersed themselves in functions, beginning some of the Upper Sixth work with wonders such as domain, range and best of all…the Modulus Function. Let these beautiful graphs blow your mind:

Physics - The Universe Year 8 is studying earth and space and students have been amazed to watch YouTube videos which aim (and of course fail) to illustrate the vast size of the universe. See one here.

They have learned about how models of the universe have changed over time, from Ptolemy to Kepler and were surprised to hear that it was once believed that the sun orbited the earth! Students provide feedback online at the end of the lesson using Microsoft Forms

15 May 2020

to share their thoughts on the most amazing thing that they had learned. Here are a few comments: I found it amazing… ‘…to zoom out of the world and travel through space watching the video because it was amazing to see the size of space.’ ‘…that in the early days people used mathematics to explain their ideas about space.’ ‘…how small the Earth is compared to our universe.’ ‘…that the closest star to Earth is four light years away.’

This week students are completing work on phases of moon and will be watching stunning images from NASA as observed by the Apollo 13 astronauts on their perilous journey around the far side of the moon. Students will see inspiring visualisations of earthset and sunrise as seen from the moon. Maybe we will inspire the next generation of astronauts.

15 May 2020