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Re: [ICTs in English] Weekly Update - Awesome aligned standards and ICTs


Chronological Thread 
  • From: Yvonne Lovelock <yvonne.lovelock AT xtra.co.nz>
  • To: "ictenglish AT lists.tki.org.nz" <ictenglish AT lists.tki.org.nz>
  • Subject: Re: [ICTs in English] Weekly Update - Awesome aligned standards and ICTs
  • Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2012 14:06:45 +1200 (NZST)

Hi Hamish and Allanah,
 
Is there an equivalent android app ....  cheers  Yvonne

From: Allanah Gmail <allanah.king AT gmail.com>
To: ictenglish AT lists.tki.org.nz
Sent: Friday, 14 September 2012 1:21 PM
Subject: Re: [ICTs in English] Weekly Update - Awesome aligned standards and ICTs

Hey Hamish

Do you know it's an app as well.


Have a great weekend.

Cheers

Allanah




On 14/09/2012, at 1:09 PM, Hamish Chalmers wrote:

One of the exciting things about the aligned standards (and the new tasks) is how they highlight the potential links between assessments and give us more options to assess student understandings of texts. It’s been exciting to hear about the different ways schools have been designing courses to give students options around they ways they’re assessed and choices over the type of artefact they submit to demonstrate their skills and understandings.

There are a bunch of ICTs that could offer this kind of flexibility to students, especially if we examine new ICTs and re-examine existing ones with an ‘assessment flexibility lens’. Sometimes an ICT might offer another way of doing the same kind of assessment (flipcams make student speech submissions do-able in a single period!) or even a totally different type of artefact; one that is still viable for assessment and offers some serious advantages over traditional methods. I’ve only got one to offer this week but would love it if people could fire in some ideas around what tools they’re using to support flexibility in assessment.

We had a go at using Voicethread a while back, particularly for close reading film. I’d gone out and purchased a bunch of headsets for students to use and they got together in pairs and constructed their own voicethreads on sections from Gattaca. One of the cool things about Voicethread is how darned easy it is to use. It’s browser-based, so can be used from pretty much any computer and allows students to string together images and film clips and then annotate them with voice, drawings and written text.

To be honest I’d pretty much lost track of it until our PE department got really interested in it for assessing a biomechanics standard. They’ve been looking recently at viable alternatives for assessment and had some massive successes recently with assessing a standard verbally that had traditionally been done in writing. During their presentation they talked about how they had to design and refine their systems for the assessment, both for the students and the staff and I was reminded of how an ICT will require some habit-training and getting used to for students, especially if it’s going to be used in an assessment situation.

The awesome there here is how easy Voicethread is to use. We need to provide very little assistance on the technical side of using something like Voicethread but should be providing as much scaffolding as possible around how to structure and develop a good Voicethread. Perhaps for a close reading Voicethread, something like an essay scaffold where body paragraphs = single sequences on separate idea(s)/effect(s). This could be an alternative to a standard chronological progression of the scene(s) and might place a greater emphasis on the ideas the students are developing. There’s some great meta (processes and strategy) knowledge here too around structuring information regardless of medium. In a differentiated class some students might be working on Voicethread, while others chip away at essay work and then both groups could compare the structure and ideas development in the two text types.

If you’re teaching senior English and wonder which standards Voicethread might work well for, it would be totally epic for the visual/oral close reading standard but also for independently read texts and significant connections across texts. I just read an awesome entry from a student on Skyrim (computer-game nerd alert!) that would have been even awesomer if it had been a Voicethread. If you wanted to get really adventurous with course design, how about a film study that gave students the option of doing the close reading standard or the film external?

So that’s my extended rant on only one ICT with potential for assessment, what else is there out there that links really well with the new standards and offers flexibility for our students?

Hamish Chalmers
Facilitator: ICTs in English
http://englishonline.tki.org.nz/






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