FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT

We still tend to connect "assessing" with the idea of "penalizing" and regarding mistakes as something negative. However, assessing should be understood of a way for the students to reflect on their own learning process.

We have different options as teachers to adopt a formative approch of assessing our students:

We can use:

a) Rubistar: http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php?skin=es&lang=es  to create our rubrics in an easy way.

b) Idoceo (Apple) or Additio App (Apple & Android): these are digital teachers' apps that allow the teachers to take record of the students' achievements. 

c) Co rubrics: created by the teacher Jaume Feliu. It's an extension to Google Drive which makes it possible for students to do peer assessment, for example, while they're doing an oral presentation.

d) INS de Gurb rubrics bank: Ins de Gurb (Osona) has shared a public bank of rubric for any teachers who wish to use them. https://sites.google.com/site/rubriquesgurb/ 

e) Avaluar per Aprendre (Xarxa de Competències Bàsiques): Website by Education Department of Generalitat de Catalunya containing a wide range of ideas and resources related to formative assessment.

Online quizzes in the digital classroom

During the course "Spice up your lessons with EdTech", we learnt three different tools to assess our students' progress:

1) Google Forms Quizzes:

We can use Google forms is a nice way to create online tests. You can make open-ended questions or multiple-choices about any topic. You can also include texts, audio tracks, videos, files, etc. It's a great tool as it saves teachers' time because you get automatic correction and the statistics on how well each student did at each of the questions. There are also different types of activities available: dragging, matching, choosing the correct option...

2) Socrative: 

Socrative is a very interesting tool that allows teachers to devise digital competition-like quizzes -similar to Kahoot, but it includes many more options. It's very interesting for teachers because you can get the students' feedback on an excel file, it allows you to print the quizzes, you can see each student's progress while they're doing the quiz on the screen. It is a nice way to revise any content at the end of a particular unit in an engaging way.

3) Plickers

Plickers is a great app that allows teachers to make tests in a very easy and dyanamic way for students. Kinaesthetic students will love it! Each student gets a printed code which contains four options (a, b, c and d). Every student has a different code, so they can't cheat. Then, the teacher scans all the students codes (they must put the codes up) and all the answers are automatically given to the teacher. It's great for shy students as the names are not shown on the screen. Then, the teacher can get the results of all the students in a particular class. I WILL DEFINITELY USE IT IN MY CLASSES! It's a lovely and engaging app for students!

TEACHERS WORKING HARD: VIRTUAL REALITY PHOTO

VIRTUAL REALITY

After having seen how the app "Expediciones" works, I have chosen 5 different expeditions that I think I could use in class with my students in the future:

1) 7 New Wonders of the World: I think this could be an interesting activity to do with 1st ESO students. I would take them to this expedition to the 7 wonders of the world. After the expedition, I would ask them to get in groups to focus on one of the wonders in order to do an oral presentation about that specific place.

2) A Day in the Life of a Surgeon: I would use this expedition as a context to make students practise the use of the modal verbs must / mustn't, can / can't. The students could be asked to write a brief text saying what they a surgeon must and mustn't do in order to be a good surgeon.

3) Ancient Rome: This could be part of project together with the Geography teacher in 1st ESO. Along with other activities, the students could be asked to create an Augmented Reality task which matches images of different Roman cities with its explanation.

4) Australia: After focusing on Australia in 4th of ESO, the students would be asked to get in groups in order to plan a 10-day trip to Australia. Then, they would be asked to present their trip plans to the rest of the class by using a Power Point or a Prezi.

5) Christmas Lights in London: At the end of the first term around Christmas time, I think I could ask my students to write about how they feel about Christmas, what they like the most about this time of the year, whether they like the way streets are decorated, etc. They could publish their texts on Padlet.

AUGMENTED REALITY

Augmented reality is a type of interactive, reality-based display environment which combines real and computer-based scenes and images to devise a create an enhanced view of the world.

In the course, we have learnt two apps that we can use to find worksheets to be used with AR: Blippar and Quiver Vision.

We also learnt HP Reveal to create Augmented Reality tasks with our students.

This is an activity done with AR:

One activity that I came up with could be to ask the students to do a quiz on the English speaking countries around the world as well as to play a game (e.g. matching the flags with the countries, matching the capital cities with its countries, etc.).

VOKI

This is Daniel! A character created using Voki. 

Voki character

Friends' catch-up