Today I taught RE and our theme was Special Places.
I used Youtube to talk about one place where I spent a very long time for many a month, the good old A406, which made up around 2-3 hours a day during my days at 2Simple.
We then contrasted this with a look at a holiday favourite of mine, rural Snowdonia, which as a place would involve a degree of pilgrimage and effort to get to. However the climb and the exhaustion is all worth it when you can sit and survey the panorama of natural beauty at the summit.
Thanks to Photosynth and my IWB we were able to stroll around the mountain and skirt around the lake and take in some of the awe and wonder.
But what of the children and their special place, this was not something all of them would feel comfortable talking or writing about and yet they each had interesting and relevant ideas to share.
Using a google form I had created earlier, I asked the children to write their answers to some key discussion and reflection points. We were fortunate in that ecah child use an Ipad to access a link I had made on the desktop to the form. In this way the Ipad acted as a giant and more attractive response system.
As they wrote I had the response spreadsheet up on-screen, this meant we could read their answers, but not necessarily know who wrote them. And as such we had both points for discussion and anonymity at the same time.
A simple but effective use of Google Forms and here is a link to over 75 more ways you can use them in your teaching.
