Year 2 RE Undergraduate students prepared for their placement with a visit to one of our partner schools Holly Lodge Girls’ College where Former Edge Hill graduate Terri Lee is Head of RE and led the informative and useful session. The afternoon began with a quiz using Socrative, to assess our prior knowledge.
Then Colin Riddell, Lead Learning Innovator at the school, went through some of the theory surrounding SOLO taxonomy, including Lego and y8 science examples.
Rachael Douglas: The session really enthused me. I loved learning about solo taxonomy and want to apply this method of teaching if I can. Good to visit the school as well.
Applying this to RE, Terri showed us an example of how she used SOLO taxonomy in her practice- an example from A Level Business Ethics.
Students then had opportunity to work on their own lesson plans structuring the planning using SOLO taxonomy.
Jade Parke: I thought it was really good and I’ll definitely use the resources they gave us in my lessons on placement! I thought the solo taxonomy was really easy to understand and is very student friendly 🙂 also I like the idea of using all that technology in classrooms
Next, Colin showed us Triptico, an Internet based collection of interactive resources which enable imaginative teachers to create engaging learning tools. One of the features is the ability to move and create hexagons on an interactive whiteboard, clearly linking to SOLO.
Next up was Edmodo, described as a bit like Facebook for schools. This is completely free! and gives teachers the ability to communicate safely with pupils. Terri showed us how she uses it with her A level students for discussion and younger pupils as a way of sharing resource which she suggests is particularly useful for stretching higher level students. By signing up and joining the classroom, we were all able to access the resources from the day.
Christie Kennedy: I really enjoyed the session, I thought the technology stuff was really good and I think solo taxonomy would be really good to use in the classroom (need to try and get my head around it a little more though)
Lastly, Terri showed us progress books, which look good in principle – as a way of tracking progress throughout a pupil’s school career, Fillling these out by hand could be can be quite tiem consuming, so creative staff such as Terri and Colin have used Google forms to generate this feedback in an efficient way.
Nicola Lyon: I think it was really useful. Solo taxonomy was good 🙂 and all the computer stuff makes life a while lot easier 🙂 I learnt a lot
