What happened today?

Speakers corner - Last year, under the guise of my role as ToK teacher, I started a 'Speakers' corner at aschool. The details of the idea can be read about here. The basic idea is pretty simple though. Students take turns to stand on a soapbox and tell us about something. We have all sorts from songs to recitals to speeches to rants, monologues and more. It has been a great addition! Of course, the challenge was to see if this could be done virtually. Thanks to three brave students who volunteerd to record their 'thing' and post it on you tube, the answer is yes! SO I sent out the advert as usual this morning and then at 13.45 -  Speakers' corner time I sent out the e-mail with the links! Simple really, but kind of satisfying. The videos have had loads of views which tells me loads of people watched - well done students - some other normality continues....

Human Loci - This is one of my favourite activities of the year  - Human Loci - and it was scheduled for this week! There in lying todays other challenge. Typically we go in to a large space and I ask students to be the points on the loci that I define. 'Everybody stands the same distance away from this chair as me' for example. It then gets nice and dynamic when I start moving and moving the objects.. I recreated that in a google draw file. I grabbed the headshots of the students on our VLE and put them all on the page. The students all moved their own image around and it was surprisingly effective. I did have a couple of miscreants which threatened to spoil things, but sense prevailed. I am also pretty sure I had a parent in my lesson today who was trying to draw shapes that represented the loci in the back ground... that was kind of weird! Still, I get a repeat lesson tomorrow, so I will try again..