After watching the Olympics on CTV I was thoroughly impressed with their segments on athlete’s ‘Difference Makers.’ These segments delved into the lives of Canadian athletes to discover the people behind the scenes who drive them to success and help athletes reach their lofty goals.
I mirrored CTV’s ‘Difference Makers’ but tailored it to my learners. I lead them to think about significant people in their lives who have help them become the wonderful people they are today.
This post talks about just one of the stages in this lesson. Most of my learners hadn’t seen any of the ‘Difference Makers’ clips so I decided to write the statement ‘Difference Makers’ on the board and asked student to discuss its meaning in partners. Normally I ask my learners to write their thoughts, ideas, or comments to the topic on sheets of large paper. Often with mixed results. However on this occasion I thought I’d try www.wallwisher.com. I created a wallwisher page free of charge, named it difference makers, and created the conditions for students to post virtual sticky notes on a virtual classroom-board. During the time my learners were posting I observed 100% engagement in the activity. Had this been with pen and paper I doubt I would have experience the same kind of results. You could argue that perhaps they were all engaged because it was new to them. I guess only time will tell.
What I like most about wallwisher is that it is customizable and allows the creator of the page to approve stickies before they appear on the wall. This