15 Second Radio Advert
Here is an outline of my recent S1 Fairtrade Lesson.
The lesson was about taste testing and comparing Fairtrade chocolate to normal chocolate, it was also about radio advertising and the power of the media. It was the last in the series of four lessons on Fairtrade.
I have started to take time to adapt and adjust my PowerPoint presentations at the start of each day. I have been trying to personalise them a little bit more for specific classes / dates. I am keen that each introduction slide contains the date. I have a couple of reasons for this 1) I am surprised that so many students don’t actually know what the date is 2) I think it helps create the impression that the presentation is new, current and up-to-date.
Next I talk about the aims (tasks) of the lesson. Again since reading more into the Assessment is for Learning documentation I have been reminded how important this particular task is. I don’t believe that we should be writing out longwinded bullet points explaining each individual outcome. But I do think a few simple words with a more detailed explanation can help set the scene for the next hour and help avoid the, ‘what are we doing next question’.
The next part of the lesson involves me talking about the homework assignment. The class have had since before the Easter Holidays to complete the Weather Porject task and it is due in next week. I have set up a wiki page to provide more detailed instructions of what is required you can see this at the departments wiki page at http://dunbargeography.wikispaces.com. When I asked the class how many people had accessed the page over the Easter holidays, over half of the hands went up. I intend to evaluate this activity and the use of the Internet to set homework – I think that it will be a successful exercise. I was also handed in two impressive finished projects.
We then moved onto the taste test. I have never seen 27 tables drawn into jotters so fast (must have been the incentive of chocolate!). Everybody received three pieces of chocolate (I helped out those not wishing to participate, we are a Health Promoting School!). The chocolate was graded using the table.
We added up the results. The favourite type of chocolate was Fairtrade Milk Chocolate, then Cadburys Milk Chocolate and the least popular was the Fairtrade Dark Chocolate.
I then posed the question to the class, ‘have you ever seen Fairtade Chocolate Advertised on the Radio or Television outside of fair-trade Fortnight?’ Nobody had. We discussed the reasons for this, the cost of advertising and the concept of advertising by word of mouth.
For the final activity. In groups the students had to design a 15 second radio advertisement advertising fair-trade chocolate. They had 10 minutes to do this from the end of the explanation to the start of the recordings.
We recorded the adverts in the last 5 minutes of the lesson straight onto my laptop. A lot of the adverts were good. These are my two favourites (although I’m not sure about the worms!).
We finished the lesson by listening to all of the recordings.