Digital Geography

I’m grateful to Melanie Richards and her Year 7 students who took part in a peer assessment of some work on urban models. The interesting dimension to this activity is that I haven’t met Melanie, and I don’t know anything about her school or her students, other than they seem very keen on Geography.

The exercise that we planned, via mutual postings on our respective school blogs, Georgeous Geography and Noel Jenkins @ Court Fields involved the peer assessment of urban models by Year 7 (students are 11/12 years old)

Having set the task for homework, we posted pictures of some of the best examples of the models on our blogs and then got students to peer assess them. This was done by getting students to record their thoughts, and adding the recordings to pictures of the work, using Window Movie Maker. The results can be downloaded from the following links, if the embedded You Tube clips below are filtered by your network!

Download video made by St Ursula’s, Greenwich, London

Download video made by Court Fields Community School, Wellington, Somerset

Neither group of students were guided in what to say, yet the responses were overwhelmingly supportive. Possibly, had we established assessment criteria, the peer assessment would have been more thorough, however this was a first attempt.

I think the experiment worked really well. The students felt their work was valued, and in the case of Court Fields school, they believed that that the St Ursula’s class were in a particularly good position to assess their work, since they live in a large city.

Thanks very much to Ms Richards and the Georgeous Geography blog. I hope we can repeat the assessment next year.