Wednesday, August 26, 2009

using student feedback

I was browsing through the two new wikis I have set up for my High School students for this new year. They'll have their first lessons on 7th September. I always put personal pages on the wikis so that students can keep their learning journals online if they wish to do so. I also always put my own page on - but why? I think that this year I will use it to reflect back their evaluations of our lessons to them.

I generally ask students to use traffic light cards during and at the end of lessons to say if they think the lesson objective was met, partly met, or not met. This is helpful for me to plan the next lesson and also to target students who need help or extension work.

So here's my idea. I'll use my personal page on their wiki to reflect on how the lesson went - using their feedback. Hopefully, they will contribute to it to say if certain activities went well or not.

Has anyone else tried anything like this? I'd love some comments and ideas.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

small group work in class

Following some ideas from Larry Ferlazzo's blog on how to make small group work I started thinking about extending my 'don't pass notes in class' idea to group work. So I immediately added group pages and instructions to my two private class wikis for next term. The idea is that when they are working on an assignment in a group, they can add a page for that project and type up a group learning journal with ideas about who said what, who had an idea, who brought some resources, and final presentation of work.

I'll let you know in a few weeks' time ...