Using Twitpic and Evernote for Peer Assessment

Wow. It kind of came to me by accident, yet it was just so obvious. My Year 9 class had to create an email for their homework, asking for information from the tourist office. If you're a languages teacher, you know exactly the exercise I'm talking about. Of course not all of the students emailed their work in. For some the internet 'unbelievably failed', others got my email address wrong, and so on and so forth. A couple of students wrote the homework down into their books, and handed that in. Hmm, I thought, that's not really what I was after. But then I had an idea, which seems so obvious, I'm sure that other teachers have done the same. I took a picture of Laura's work (above) with my iPhone, and uploaded it to my Evernote page. I then logged on to Evernote and had Laura's work up on the screen for all to see. I then thought - I've two twitter accounts - @blagona for me, and @northgatemfl for my department. Why not use the my department's twitter account to take pictures of students' work, send them to twitpic, and get students to log on and comment. It's simple! You can keep things anonymous if need be, and for those of us with iPhones, you can instantly take a picture of a student's piece of work and within seconds, with no USB pens or memory cards have the work on display on your interactive whiteboard. It formed a key part of my lesson today, and it only came to me because Laura's computer had crashed at home. There just has to be someone somewhere who has done this already...please get in touch if you have!

Teaching, Learning...and Understanding

To avoid the craziness that would have been having to come in to school on a Monday in July, our school decided to have a number of compulsory/voluntary twilight sessions on Teaching and Learning, and earn the staff an extra day of holiday.

So, Wednesday was a compulsory one, and school even ended 40 minutes early so we would benefit from 2h30 of listening to Mike Hughes, renowned author and trainer. He was also a Headteacher/Mentor and thousands of other things. On the whole it was a good session, with lots of useful advice. It was quite nice to be able to just sit and listen to someone talk rather than actually have to do anything! Amongst covering other topics, Mike emphasised the difference between students' learning, and their understanding, and looked at how our attitude to questioning students in our classes could make a tangible difference to improving the kids' understanding of the things we are trying to teach them. He made a suggestion, which was for a teacher to go in to the last 10 minutes of a lesson in a different subject, and to carry out a plenary activity, to gauge what the students had learned, and to also assess what they had understood, I suppose by their ability to explain it to a non-specialist.

To that end, I am going to a Y12 Chemistry lesson on Tuesday to attempt to carry out a plenary, with the Chemistry teacher coming to my Y10 French lesson on Thursday. Is it going to be a worthwhile exercise, something worth repeating? Have you tried something similar? I guess I'll let you know on Tuesday!