The following seems to be going down well with my class. They are both enjoying it and seem to be learning more about current affairs at the same time.
What it is
Once a week when the children (who are 10 or 11 years old) come into class for morning registration, I’ll have something like this up on the whiteboard.
The game is simple. They need to do three things:
- spot the mistakes on the site
- say what the correction should be and
- explain what the story is about.
So, for example, with the above they’d need to
- spot that it shouldn’t be Holly and Drew, (or Amelia, or Nora, or Armand);
- suggest something close to businesses and
- explain that it has to do with the Scottish vote for independence and businesses saying they will move south if Scotland breaks away from the Union.
So far, the children are in loose teams but (and I’m pleased about this) they’re more interested in the stories behind the news than points. So far the feedback has been good, from children and parents.
How to do it
It all relies on a tool called Goggles from Mozilla’s Webmaker project. It takes a minimal – and really minimal – level of HTML.
Instructions for how to install the tool into your browser are on the Googles site.
Once done you go to the page you want (for me, the BBC site) to get something like this …
Click the “Activate Goggles” bookmark.
Roll over the text you want to change and click there.
Find the text you want to change, edit it and “Save Changes”
Click Escape to see your changes and then screenshot the page (or leave it up on the whiteboard)
Let me know if you’ve got any ways to improve it – or if there are serious problems…