Walking Talking Exams

Class Teaching

The 15 Minute Forum tonight was led by science teacher, Jody Chan. The idea of ‘Walking Talking Exams’ (WTE) came from a PiXL meeting, attended by my Deputy Head colleague, Jane Squires. Their approach to it is described in this article from The Guardian, and a quick search on Google revealed that you can even find videos of ‘Walking Talking Exams’ in action, such as this maths one.

I wouldn’t suggest you watch the whole thing – but it gives you a flavour of the process.

Jody has adapted the process for her classroom. She felt that whilst her students had good scientific knowledge, they were losing too many marks, due to poor exam technique. So she saw this strategy as a good way of supporting students to develop this. In the past, like most teachers, when it came to practice exams, Jody set them the exam, the students did it…

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10 Calculator Buttons you need in your life #revision #gcse #alevel

Need help in Maths? See some amazing tricks with your calculator here. It’s almost cheating:

RGS Maths

Before we start, let me get one thing out of the way – you will only get so far without showing your working. Nevertheless, even a seasoned Maths student needs some calculator skills from time to time. Enjoy.

1. Time conversion between decimal and hours/mins/secs can be tricky. Check your answer with the snazzy ‘commas and dot’ button:

Type your decimal, e.g. 2.4 (hours) press equal then convert with the button below Alpha B.

Your life is now complete.

(As Will Davies rightly pointed out on my earlier post: I use it for time, but this button is actually to convert angles into degrees, minutes and seconds ie fractions of degrees – 60ths and 3600ths)

2. Prime Factorisation

Want to check your product of primes? Or better still, check whether a number is prime?

Simply type your number, press equal then convert with FACT (next to the Alpha B). If…

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