Power League – stimulating debate

http://www.powerleague.org.uk/

This website from Futurelab describes itself as a “fun and easy way to explore any topic [...] Power League is a versatile resource that lets you ask tough questions, stimulates debate and creates a visual league table based on votes gathered across your group.” Essentially you choose a question, for example, “Which is the bigger cause of climate change?”and set up a league. Students are offered a series of random choices between two people or things, e.g. Deforestation and Farming, each backed up with a link to more information. After they’ve made a number of choices you can view the league. Currently in the World Power League (“Who do you wish had more power?”) Albert Einstein is top of the list, Michael Owen second from bottom.

This ideal for use in English, Citizenship, Geography, History, RE and indeed any subject that asks students to make decisions about aspects of what they are studying and be able to debate why they made that choice. The website includes a number of lesson plans.

Comic Life

Comic Life is an excellent bit of software that helps students create very attractive comic strips, using photos, speech bubbles, colourful titles and a large number of layouts. It can be used for story-telling, or story-boarding a film or play, and therefore is useful in a large number of curriculum areas. Recently at the CLC it was used to tell the story of Martin Luther King in history, and also to storyboard the French films about the new school.

See examples and .

The CLC has Comic Life in both large computer rooms, or you can download a 30 day free trial from http://plasq.com/products/ It has both PC and Mac versions.