Using Discovery Box in KS3 Maths and English
 Using Discovery Box at St Louis Middle School, Bury St Edmunds |
The East of England Broadband Consortium (E2BN) has been working alongside teachers in year 7 and 8 at St Louis Middle School, Bury St Edmunds to help them develop ways to use Discovery Box. The set of tools are aimed at helping pupils build up an argument related to a specific issue or pulling together information which helps them answer a specific enquiry.
Discovery Box allows pupils to gather together digital resources - images, video clips, audio clips, Word documents, text files, spreadsheets, weblinks etc - and present them in a unique way.
In Mathematics year 7 and 8 pupils have been using the Discovery Box tools to present what they know about triangles and specifically to answer the enquiry question, "How do we know that the three angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees?" They have taken photographs of their own triangular constructions, sourced other pictures from E2BN's Image Gallery (http://gallery.e2bn.org/) , researched the internet for websites with supporting material and created documents and presentations.
English groups in years 7 and 8 have been working to develop their skills of building and presenting an argument. The focus of their work was the question, "Are humans cruel to animals?"
The pupils researched articles found both in print media and on the internet, accessed galleries of images to support their points, created their own presentations and documents and made links to relevant websites.
The work done on both the Maths and English groups is now available to view on the Discovery Box website at http://discoverybox.e2bn.org/gallery/index.php?org=42
Some comments from the pupils:
"What I really liked best about it was that I could start my work in school and then go home and carry on with the same thing."
"It's great that you can just use any type of stuff like pictures and videos and weblinks and anything really."
"It' so easy to learn how to use Discovery Box and you can use your own photos and video clips and you can even record a piece of video with your webcam. That's really cool!"
"I like that when you go to images there are already thousands of pictures for you to use so even if you have no pics of your own there are lots to use"