(All evaluations of whether I carried this out and reflections are indicated in
bold)
I have done some research into the educational resources used within school that I have felt are appropriate for use with sixth form aged students and as a sixth form student I have used my own judgement and the response of my peers to resources/activities that could be adapted for my project.
During form the other week we used a large sheet of paper and felt pens to write the first things that we think of when a word was given to us. This was a well received activity within the form group and I would like to use this in the production of my educational resources- possibly asking the students to write down everything they think of when they see the word "PLASTIC".
This was an activity I used and I believe will be easy to carry out and get people thinking. I chose this activity because I know that teachers do not have the time or the access to resources which may have been needed for other activities and paper and pens are available in all classrooms to all teachers- making the activities within the PowerPoint easier to carry out and therefore more likely to be used in the future.
Something another teacher pointed out to me was that I should adapt my resources to fit certain school requirements for form which include the use of literacy and numeracy skills so my second activity within the PowerPoint will be focused around this- possibly getting people to calculate their carbon footprint and then link this to the plastic problem. I am currently unsure of how I will achieve this.
This was another point that I achieved as numeracy skills were added to the resources. I created an activity which gave the students statistics of how long different plastic items took to break down and then asked them to calculate how long their weekly plastic output would take to break down. This not only gets students using maths skills but it also gets them to see the amount of time that their behaviors impact upon the planet. This also shows that their actions have huge consequences and that they also have the possibility to reverse this effect and have a huge positive effect by reducing plastic consumption.
I plan to add a quiz to my resources as this can easily be incorporated into the weekly form activities which already have a quiz that is done every Wednesday. This is something that my peers and I find very engaging and take part in every week so I know that it will be effective in communicating the scale of the plastic problem.
The quiz was added to the end of my PowerPoint slides because it then means that the person in charge of the distribution of my resources when I leave will have easy access to all of the resources that I have created.
Creating these resources was difficult as I had to monitor my own bias because my opinions don't matter because the resources had to be based on fact. This was successful but my strong feelings towards the environmental damage plastic causes had to be monitored because my resources had to be informative and not upsetting to any students. This is a valuable skill I have learnt and as somebody wishing to go into research I think that I now understand the importance of professionalism within a resource or paper that I create.
