Effective Assessment

I started to think about all that I have learnt and really wanted to detail how this may look in the classroom. With all that I have read and understood I wanted to outline exactly how I understand this working.

Finally, after much research I have come to the conclusion that using a blog to track student progress will be effective and I will need to try this out in practise in my future teaching career. There is a lot of justification for using blogs rather than pencil and paper.

So my idea is this: (relevant in any context, I will use a science experiement.. set at level 4-5. Each student will sign up for their own blog on Blogger.com. They will be responsible for posting an entry of at least three sentences every day to their blog describing their progression throughout the project (including the proposal/planning process). Each student will submit a proposal for approval that outlines:

1. What scientific field their experiment is based in.
2. What their experiment will attempt to prove or disprove.
3. Who originally performed their experiment.
4. What the original outcome of the experiment was.
5. How they will reproduce the experiment.
6. How they will convey their final findings.
7. How long their experiment will take.
8. What supplies they will require for the experiment.

Upon proposal approval, each student will be allowed to undertake their experiment process. Because different experiments will require different lengths of time to complete, the deadline for each student will be determined by the student themselves (and graded according to how well they have allocated and managed their work time). Upon experiment conclusion, the students will be expected to create a final write-up and reflection that details their findings and hypothesizes on errors, improvements, and areas for possible expansion for the experiment in the future.

The unique use of blogs is taken advantage of by allowing the outside world to see exactly what steps each student has taken in their experiment recreation (not to mention the students themselves having access to this information) which enables the audience to then judge the validity of the recreation almost immediately after each step has been taken (rather than after the entire experiment has been concluded).

Brenda Dyck used blogger.com in her classroom, she I created a blog for each student. Their blogs would be their workspaces and they would be places where students could write their thoughts after daily classroom discussions, and they would be jumping off points for future classroom interactions. She read and responded to students' blogs, and post questions and resources, to encourage students to explore their questions about their topic.

What about assessment challenges? She raised the question "How do I take a qualitative-based activity like a blog and turn it into a quantitative grade?" A couple of examples she provided were : how well students' blogs integrated the concepts and principles from class discussions and activities and how effectively students' writing conveyed their understanding of the problems and myths surrounding their topic.

I agree and this will be relevant in any examples of childrens work, not just isolated to the use of blogs. I also think that the teacher needs to realise the reality that not all children will be able to convey there understanding in this way and be completely overwhelmed by this concept.

It is important that we understand the needs of ICT literacy and ensure that we are not scaring our students away from the use of computers. Some suggestions are outlined in a lesson by Meredith Broderick. She initiated a blogging project with her students, while being introduced to Internet grammar and information literacy.

I think this is helpfull to the developing of ICT literacy and children are better able to navigate sites, and continue to develop knowledge through continual usage.. and this knowledge will continue to grow throughout their lifetime.