Secondary 1
Accessing interactive materials to use on a digital projector
A digital projector linked to a computer is an excellent addition to RE learning, and is particularly effective when used in conjunction with a broadband internet connection. A digital connection enables you to introduce short, interactive supporting materials to lessons, adding variety and impact to pupils’ learning.
Even if you don’t have a broadband connection in your classroom, you can use a laptop to store material from the internet and display it on the projector for use in the lesson. See the Cumbria Lancashire Education Online (CLEO) website for an article explaining how to save web pages to use offline.
With a remote presentation device such as a wireless (Bluetooth) mouse, you can control the projector without having to be near it. You can move around the class with the mouse, or encourage the pupils to control the equipment themselves. The activities covered below show how an interactive poster can be used to support pupils who are studying Sikhism and Buddhism.
Using an interactive poster: The story of Rajni (Sikhism)
One of the most useful materials in teaching Hinduism and Sikhism is the ‘Bazaar Print’. Sometimes the subject matter is a deity or a guru, or an illustration of important episodes in a narrative.
You can find a poster representing the popular Sikh story of Rajni in the RE area of the CLEO website. There are two versions of the resource one with captions and one without and they can be used in a variety of ways.
For example:
as a starter activity, using a digital projector with the whole class
The no-caption version (to be found in Useful Documents in the Learners section) shows enlargements of the image with no explanation of their meaning. You could use these to interpret the visual clues shown in the poster by discussing with the pupils what they have learnt previously, and encourage the pupils to speculate about what is happening by prompting them with questions such as:
The with caption version of the poster (see the Teachers section, under Useful Documents) includes a ‘hotspots’ option which tells the story of Rajni. You could use this with pupils to:
larify their understanding of why this story is important to Sikhs
Using an interactive poster: Buddhist beliefs about suffering and rebirth
One of the most important concepts in Buddhism is the Buddha’s explanation of the cause of suffering and rebirth. The Wheel of Life painting, best known in its Tibetan versions, has been used by Buddhists for many centuries as a teaching aid to communicate these concepts. It is also very useful for explaining the Buddhist Dhamma, and many RE teachers use it for this.
One of the versions most often used in classrooms is the poster of a Tangkha painted by Andy Weber, a German artist who has studied Tibetan Buddhism. It shows Yama, Lord of the Dead, holding the six realms in which rebirth is possible. At the centre, the cockerel (symbolising desire) and the snake (hatred) emerge from the mouth of the pig (ignorance).
An interactive version of the poster is accessible on the CLEO RE website. Moving the cursor over the 24 sections of the poster causes close-ups to appear alongside text explanations.
At Key Stage 3, you may want to focus on the realms of rebirth, the main animal symbols, and the escape from rebirth through the remedy of wisdom and compassion: the doctrine of dependent origination (Paticcasamuppada) is likely to be too complex for students at this level. (The Buddha himself is quoted as admonishing his favourite disciple, Ananda, for claiming this teaching was easy to understand.)
There are many benefits of an interactive poster:
As a development activity, you could ask your students to compare Buddhist and Christian depictions of hell, using online paintings such as Hieronymus Bosch’s Hell (accessible through numerous online art archives). (Note, however, that school firewalls may prevent access to art-related websites.)
To support their understanding and encourage reflection, ask pupils to create their own versions of the Wheel of Life (a downloadable template is available on the CLEO site), concentrating on the six realms of rebirth. They can either draw their ideas or copy and paste images gathered from focused use of a web search engine such as Google Image Search (be careful about copyright restrictions). Ask them to consider how modern images could be used to convey the idea of the extreme suffering, as depicted in the Hell Realm.
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