Less marking, more feedback

My mind was blown at the end of Term 2 during the Primary ICT Showcase. Seeing the range of talent on show within the Primary School was inspiring and something to be celebrated loudly.

We began the showcase with Demo Slams, the opportunity for ordinary teachers to display their extraordinary tech integration to their peers. Ben Henry, Grade 5, Dover was one of the slam recruits and he showed the crowd his awesome use of QuickTime Player to facilitate giving feedback about a piece of writing.

I’ll let Ben set the scene:

The children had been working on their Historical Fiction stories during Writing Workshop and it was the week before their final edit.  For their homework task, each ‘Writing Buddy’ was asked to read their partner’s story and to identify a couple of areas that they were impressed with, along with a suggestion for the final edit. The children had the option of drawing from my marking comments already in the Google Doc, but it was remarkable how accurate the buddies were at making a relevant suggestion that would improve the writing. The children communicated their suggestions for improvements and the elements they were impressed with using QuickTime player in the form of a screen recording. Since the children enjoyed making the screen recordings, and are equally (if not more) concerned with their partner’s comments as they are with mine, I will certainly be using this method in the future.

Here is an example of a student giving feedback to their writing partner.

Grade 5 'Peer 2 Peer' Feedback from UWC South East Asia on Vimeo.

Sean McHugh (DLC on the Dover Campus) has written about RAT and SAMMS in previous posts on this blog. What Ben demonstrated in his use of video feedback is in the transformative area of RAT; ‘technology as transformation’. Being able to give this level of useful feedback moves both the writer and the student giving feedback forward in their understanding of the concepts. The writer has demonstrated that they are able to listen to the lessons given in class about how to write this particular genre and process them to create a comprehensive piece of writing. The student giving feedback has to understand the genre well in order to give feedback to their partner and move their writing on. By allowing the chance for peer to peer feedback the skills being demonstrated and developed by both parties are immense.

The beauty of using technology to facilitate this process is listed in the SAMMS framework. The fact that Google docs can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection (Situational), allows for instant reworking of the piece (Mutability) and provides a space where two students and the teacher can collaborate on one document (Social).

It is also a brilliant example of Dylan Wiliam’s Assessment for Learning strategies.

Wiliam breaks down AfL into 5 key strategies

1. Clarifying learning intentions

2. Eliciting evidence

3. Feedback that moves learning forward

4. Students as learning resources for one another

5. Students as owners of their own learning (ownership - metacognition, motivation, interest, attribution, self-assessment)

(Wiliam & Thompson, 2007)

Ben’s use of feedback thoroughly demonstrated the third and fourth points in Wiliam’s list. The students receive feedback from their teacher and also from a peer to improve their writing. Before I saw this being used I would have guessed that the feedback being given from a writing partner would be a little shaky and inaccurate at best. After seeing this in practice the feedback being given is 90% accurate and very well articulated.

To anyone who would like to do less marking and give more feedback using screen casting come and speak to myself or Ben for more details.

Poetry - Made Multimodal!

This incredible, beautiful example inspired me to approach our English teachers to consider making their work with poetry multimodal; showing this to them was a pretty persuasive pitch.

One of the many great things about my job is that I get to work with teachers and students throughout the college, from Kindergarten to Grade 12. One of the fabulous aspects to this is how often the fundamentals that are introduced in the Primary School, are just as effective and just as powerful in the Middle and High Schools.

We have been making a concerted effort to ensure that when we talk about 'digital literacy' we back that with some fundamentals, specifically the expectation that as our students move through the college they move from introduction to consolidation to competence in the five core domains of video, image, text, audio, and data. What follows is one example this year of integrating three of these into students experiences with poetry, by making it multimodal.

Multimodal Poetry

This work began by focusing on our Grade 4 students, nearing the end of a Writing Workshop focus on poetry. Instead of leaving it as a text only celebration, we asked the students to reimagine one of their poems, adding imagery—be it still or moving image. Some students were more literal in their interpretation, others more abstract, but the best skilfully combined both. Then they added the power of sound, choosing music and even sound effects to complement their own narration.

What I find really exciting though, is that as why I was able to take these videos to our Grade 7 teachers, whose students were ending a focus on poetry, only in this case they had been analysing and exploring an anthology of poetry. So we asked them to choose one... and make it multimodal. 

Grade 4

Grade 7

Whether it was a grade 4 poem the students wrote themselves, or a poem chosen by a Grade 7 student from an anthology, the teachers consistently commented on how powerful and insightful it was to see each students understanding of poetry made visual, made audible; made multimodal. 

Resources

If you're keen to have a go, here's a link to the site page where I collated the resources—I used the same resources with both Primary and Middle School classes. 

http://findsounds.com/ 

http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/ 

These sites are fabulous for downloading music:

https://www.bensound.com/ 

http://freemusicarchive.org/

https://www.jamendo.com/ 

Essay planning and drafting with Mindmeister

Brainstorming or creating a mind map is a common process to help students develop ideas and to encourage ideation. In many classes, a brainstorm is used as the first planning step in a writing process which flows into drafting.

Online tools such as mindmaps can be a simple way to enhance the planning stage of student writing. When the tool is mutable ie. student can reorder, change and edit their thoughts on the go it should support deeper thinking and exploration of ideas. When doing a similar activity with paper, students are constrained by the size of their paper, frustrated when they need to erase or make a change and struggle to reorder the hierarchy of their thoughts. Whilst you can also plan in a word document and rearrange ideas, the visual element of a mindmap should be an important consideration.

Mindmeister is an online mind mapping tool that our student can use to develop an essay outline and then translate these notes into a text document. A clever export function allows students to export the structure and contents of their mindmap as headings and bullets in a word document. As shown below, this simple trick takes thier ideas into the an essay plan, helping them to draft potentially each paragraph and sentence.

Few tips:

1. UWCSEA subscribes to Mindmeister and this is linked to each students GApps accounts.
2. This can be accessed from the grid app icon at top of GMail/GDrive.
3. Students can click share, to send a link to the teacher or class site / learning platform.
4. They can also invite collaborators, but this slows the speed of the website down considerably.
5. Small downwards arrow at bottom allows export function - MS Word translates document into headings, and sentences, but unselect all of the options to get a cleaner look with only text.

See video below for a full walkthrough.

Digital Writing Workshop

Rachel Wright, Grade 4, captures the powerful synergy of Digital Writing Workshop in action and edits them together with iMovie.