International Women's Day/Women's History Month

Tuesday 8th March marks International Women’s Day, while the month of March is Women’s History Month, so we have created a dedicated, FREE iPad activity for your students to use.

This year’s IWD theme is ‘Pledge for Parity’, and anyone can join in to support the event. One way is to pledge your support to one of the following:

• help women and girls achieve their ambitions
• challenge conscious and unconscious bias
• call for gender-balanced leadership
• value women and men's contributions equally
• create inclusive, flexible cultures

There are many ways to put this pledge in action, such as spreading the word (social media details below), organising an event, or helping to get young people discussing such topics and the history behind them.

In light of this, we've created a FREE ‘Women’s Suffrage - UK’ iPad activity for those around 14-16 (or younger/older depending). Working with English teacher Elizabeth Doyle, and an illustrator to bring the information to life, we have a 24 piece, problem-solving iPad activity for students to work on alone, in pairs or small groups. The main task question is 'Who should get the credit for the success of the campaign to give British women the vote on equal terms with men?'

All you/students have to do is:

1. Download the FREE Thinking Kit App onto iPads - click here or search ‘Thinking Kit App’ on the App Store.
2. Go to Educator or Learner then ‘New session’
3. Tap ‘Download task’
4. Enter the number 4 - it will immediately start downloading
5. Tap on the task then begin!

A screenshot of students completing the task in the Thinking Kit App

If you/students want to customise it, you can use the FREE trial of the Thinking Kit Creator (no card details required) to do so quickly and easily. The tool, which can be used on any device on any browser, allows you to open up any public activity and make a new copy to edit as you please.

Ideas:

• Add new bits of information/images or delete some of ours so that you can focus on a particular strand
• Get students to research/discuss the topic then add their own slips of thoughts/information/images. Class members can then use each other's tasks.
  
  E.g they could add more facts, thoughts on how the events impacts modern life/what life might be like now if it hadn’t taken place - anything! It’s a great way to get the students’ creativity flowing at the same time as developing digital literacy skills, writing and speaking/listening.
• Follow Elizabeth’s recommended difficulty levels (included in the description of the task when you download it). These can easily be recreated in the Thinking Kit Creator. The task is by default, the 'hard' level - just delete the slips that Elizabeth hasn't included for easy/medium, and also see the different sub-questions which she has included too.
• Create a brand new Thinking Kit activity on International Women's Day or Women's History Month.

Edit the activity in the Thinking Kit Creator - change text, add/remove images, add more slips, change background.

We’d love to know how you use the activity with your students this month, so please comment below, tweet us at @refthinking or email info@reflectivethinking.com. We’ll feature your feedback on our social media pages and e-news! Remember, download the task with the Thinking Kit App (iPad) and/or edit it with the Thinking Kit Creator (any browser).

For more details on the occasions you can click on any of the links below. There are some brilliant events going on, free resources, discussions and more.

International Women’s Day

• Official website
• Twitter @womensday - When you tweet about it, include #IWD2016 or #PledgeforParity
• Facebook page
• LinkedIn group
• YouTube - see videos and interviews on the topics being considered

Women’s History Month

• Official website
• Twitter @womenshistory