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Re: [ICTs in English] Weekly Update - How are we getting to know our students?


Chronological Thread 
  • From: Maria Persson <mariap AT waikato.ac.nz>
  • To: "ictenglish AT lists.tki.org.nz" <ictenglish AT lists.tki.org.nz>
  • Subject: Re: [ICTs in English] Weekly Update - How are we getting to know our students?
  • Date: Fri, 8 Feb 2013 11:32:39 -0500

My first suggestion - keeping it short and simple is google forms!!

Easy to create, execute and it collates the data for you in 'excel' format and it even produces results in graph form. 

Students could create forms and give them to each other, it could be used pre and post assessment and would at least provide an indication of the varying needs you'll have with minimum fuss. 

Lots out there but this comes to mind as we use it and love it and because it easily embeds into our LMS. 

Take care - from freezing cold Canada. 

Maria

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Sent from Maria's iPhone

On 7/02/2013, at 10:38 PM, Hamish Chalmers <hchalmers AT ashs.school.nz> wrote:

Profiling our students - getting an idea of where they’re at so we can figure out exactly how to differentiate effectively for their learning needs. This can sometimes be a difficult task for a number of reasons. We might already feel pressured with the amount of stuff we need to get through in a year and giving up half or a full class for a diagnostic test might seem a bit much, not to mention the marking load. Then there’s figuring out exactly what to find out about our students. Do we want to know about their writing skills or reading skills? Their listening or speaking skills? And what about viewing and creating? There’s also so many different areas within each of those that it can all start to get a bit daunting.

All that said, it’s also really obvious that we do need to find out about our student’s current skills to do a better job of tailoring learning for them individually. Even if we do have those crazy classes of 30+! ICTs can help us here though. While learning how to do something new on a computer can take longer the first few times the efficiency and extra information we get further down the track can make the initial time well-worth it.

So what kind of ICTs are we using to get more information about our new lots of students?
Does anyone have any neat database tricks to extract something actually helpful from those horrible database user interfaces? There’s often a wealth of information from their previous years (asTTle, PAts and school assessments etc) how are we recording and accessing this? And how are we manipulating it to get some really helpful representations relevant to our student’s contexts? Does anyone do anything really nerdy like exporting to shreadsheets, filtering, and comparing?

There’s some pretty handy online tools to take the time out of diagnostic testing and marking too, particularly with technical accuracy in writing. Despite the huge numbers of things we could choose to look for, a well-designed programme and finding out from students what they want out of their English year can all help us figure out a focus for the early part of our year.

Lots of suggestions on the list this week in response to a request for some visual language text creation assistance. Awesome stuff. Hope everyone’s starting out well, it’s been really interesting to read all the ideas on the list, keep them coming!

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

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