Teach Secondary Issue 14.7

21st century thinking The range of online revision tools and resources available for students is only getting bigger – so how can teachers help them separate the helpful wheat from the counterproductive chaff? work was a whole other world taking in the palm of her hand. Thumbs tapping, finger scrolling, the anxious parent asking, ‘ Are you actually revising...? ’ – those phone and tablet screens were portals to something else entirely. The colour options for Post-it notes alone would be enough to make a 1960s O-Level student marvel. The cyberspace expanse of the early web would have stopped them in their tracks. AI-made revision questions? Incomprehensible. Those screens that we parents worry about so much can, of course, be a student’s best friend. The online landscape continues to offer a heady mix of content, AI tools and apps to help with efficiency and wellbeing – not to mention countless online communities made up of peers who are reliably ready to provide help and assistance across multiple social media platforms. But just because these rich pickings are available, it doesn’t necessarily follow that your students will know about them, or how best to use them. It would be like expecting a Y7 pupil to magically know how to ‘do’ homework. Best not to leave it to chance. Besides which, as teachers, it would be foolish to pretend this virtual world simply doesn’t exist. When we make our online classrooms and subject guides, or put together talks for parents, we need to cover what the digital world has to offer. 1. Entry-level AI chatbots Think of a subject, an exam board and a topic. Then ask an AI chatbot, such as ChatGPT, to generate some questions. For example: ‘ Give me five questions to help me revise cell structures for AQABiology GCSE. ’ It’s as simple as that. Try it out with your own subject, and then demonstrate how students might be able to use this approach at home. Alongside that, model how to sit with a pen and paper and attempt to actually answer the questions – because reading questions alone and thinking about them hopefully (‘ Oh yes, I know that! ’) isn’t revision. It’s also worth showing students how this approach can easily go wrong if you forget to specify the exam board or muddle questions up – e.g. ‘ How does Priestley show he is sociable? ’ 2.Quizzing and recall There are a number of applications available that can generate virtual flashcards, or provide ready access to existing flashcards on set topics. Your school may have invested in a platform like Carousel Learning (carousel-learning. com), based around the concept of spaced retrieval practice – a process whereby A s I write these words, I’m still basking in the success of my eldest daughter’s GCSE results – and I can tell you that they didn’t happen by chance. I’ve watched in wonder over the past year as she built timetables, drew up colour-coded grids, annotatedmark-schemes, got throughmore and more highlighter pens, shuffled flashcards and worked through past papers. On the face of it, what she was doing didn’t look all that different fromwhat I got up to in the 1990s (though she was far more meticulous thanme). And bar a slowly- expanding range of stationery options, I wonder whether my own experiences were especially different again fromwhat my mother got up to in the 1960s... Aheadymix However, running in tandem with all this paper-and-pen 28 teachwire.net/secondary