Archive for the 'Student work' Category

Peer assessment between schools

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)

pcmodel

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.

Year 7 models on You Tube

It was great to see SLN user Melanie Richards using the photographs of my Year 7 homework to inspire her own students. This is precisely why I continue with the whole blogging lark! Melanie posted an excellent video on You Tube. Her blog Gorgeous Geography is here.

Slideshare used for peer assessment

Nice to see an example of social constructivism from teacher David Rogers who has posted presentations from his class on Slideshare for others to read and comment on.

[Slideshare presentation now removed]

New blog for my students

I’ve been very slow off the mark in blogging for/with my own students, compared to many of my online teacher friends and colleagues. That’s set to change with a new blog:

njblog

I’m going to use the blog in three ways. Firstly to link to various online materials that could be interesting or useful to the students. Secondly, I’d like to host some examples of student work. Finally, I’m hoping that it will provide an opportunity for those dialogues that could/should take place outside the classroom but never actually materialize. For example the comments could be used to discuss matters arising from homework assignments, examinations or current affairs. I guess we shall see.

Peer vs Public assessment: Google Earth blogs and polls

With peer assessment a currently popular trend, I decided to add a twist and get members of the public to vote and comment on some Year 8 work.

hospitals

It occurred to me that a basic web poll and blog comments would serve to give students useful feedback on their work. The assignment was based around my Google Earth San Francisco lesson. I’ve mentioned before that the ease with which Google Earth placemarks can be created and shared, makes them ideal for assessing spatially located geographical work.

Go here to my new Google Earth blog to find the poll and the students work. Download the work as a Google Earth file, together with the teaching materials, and vote for your favourite. Leaving a comment would provide the students with additional feedback. We would be particularly keen to hear from any residents of San Francisco!

The students and I would be very grateful for all feedback.

Flood in a flume; a web cam movie edited in Jumpcut

The whole movie took 40 minutes to put together, from uploading the video clips, adding transitions and annotation, and final publishing. Well easy!

Hint: Press play, then pause the movie to allow buffering time.

More web cam moments

Another example of the potential of web cams in the classroom. In the video a year 7 student explains how she created her model river. In doing so she reveals her creativity, resourcefulness and geographical understanding.