Stretch, Challenge and Problem Solving at Gairloch High School

Post date: Nov 15, 2015 6:12:16 PM

Myself (Geography) and Jim Sutherland (Computing) have taken the chance to include new stretch and challenge activities for our BGE classes utilising the Google Apps platform. In each of these examples we've encouraged pupils to problem solve, research and increase their own skills which will benefit the wider class as they can share this knowledge in the future. We've deliberately given them very little guidance and let them independently work out how to get the right solution - definitely a skill for life! Using Google Apps for Education (especially Classroom) is allowing us to do this in a whole new way.

Jim's class have been working on producing podcasts and have built them on audacity. He asked pupils to see if they could work out how to export their podcast as an mp3, which meant they had to either trial the different functions or conduct some research using websites or YouTube.

My S2 Geographers have been working on graphs (creating, describing and explaining) in class. I've introduced options to complete their consolidation task on familiar graph paper or to look into how they can do this using Google Sheets. Most (if not all!) of the pupils have very little experience using Excel. Pupils who challenge themselves to work on Sheets will then become lead learners who can assist their classmates when we use it later in the year for a whole class activity.