plans for the new academic year

Well, I have just 'broken up' for summer (or the students have - I still need to do a bit in work this coming week) and already I am bursting with ideas for next year.

It looks like I'll be taking on a Year 11 Maths GCSE (age 15/16) class from someone else so will basically have 2 terms (Sept to Easter) to get them working my way - or perhaps for me to be working their way?

The last two years have seen me experimenting with and having some success with using a private wiki for each class. Due to age and such issues it's best to keep them for invited members only and to have just me as moderator.

It started as an extension to the idea of a learning journal (LJ). For quite a few years now, I have asked students to keep a learning journal after each class with key ideas and their 'thinking out loud'. I cannot exactly say I have irrefutable evidence but it appears that those who do a good job also tend to exceed their target grades. Of course, there are many other variables such as do they tend to be the ones who study harder or are more motivated anyway? I do strongly believe though that the LJ helps motivate and helps them to develop a degree of metacognition.

So the wikis began with each student having her or his own page and sharing their LJ with others. I developed it this last year to share useful resources and links and revision ideas and games to hone their skills - they loved that! It remains to be seen in August how much that development has helped. I later started using an idea taken from Michael Wesch of putting keywords on the wiki as an assignment and everyone had to make an entry and/or edit each other's - like wikipedia. Of course I had to monitor that carefully in case of misconceptions but it was no more onerous than marking homework.

Just before the final exams ( about 6 weeks before) I read a blog from Howard Rheingold about Twitter back channels. I did not feel that I could encourage phones or social networking in school as it is against current policy - and I know many positives and negatives for that policy which I won't go into here. So I hit on the idea of a page called "Hey! Don't pass notes in class!" When students were working on exam prep questions. they could come up to the interactive white board any time they liked and either offer tips for classmates or ask each other for help. Once again they loved it and it really made them focus in class. There was absolutely no off task chatter. By having the wiki page for that lesson displayed whilst they did this, I could save it for them to access at home or any time they wanted to remind themselves of a technique.

So on to next year - what do I have in store? All of the above plus:

• I'm going to put collaborative projects like the Google Earth Maths projects on
• I am going to encourage the LJ as a blog
• The lesson plan and classroom rules will be added
• Assignments will be set so that they can hand them in via our school VLE which will be linked to the wiki

I can't wait!