Monday 25 April 2011

Idea for a project

What did you do in school today? is a research project that was carried out in Canada throughout 17 districts. I was presented with some of the ideas through this study at the PPTA professional conference held in Wellington.
The ideas that were outlined got me thinking and I jumped on the net during the presentation hoping to find more.
The link to the report that was produced is here, http://www.cea-ace.ca/programs-initiatives/wdydist
What did you do in school today? captures, assesses, and mobilizes ideas for enhancing the learning experiences of students in classrooms and schools through a multidimensional framework of student engagement.
However, I think it is a great idea on a different front. How many times is this question asked at home, what information is given to parents on what there child did during the day.
We have a daily reporting system at school in which the students who are placed on it by the deans carry it around and we as teachers have to write a comment and sign it. Normally this is done at the end of the period just as the student is about to exit the class, and we as teachers just want to get ready for the next lesson. So is it really doing what it is meant to do.
The rules I have for the students that are placed on daily are: it must be handed to me at the beginning of lesson, if not I will not fill it in and sign it. I need to know which of the three boxes at the top that this is for.
The three categories that we look at are:
  • Attendance
  • Behaviour/Attitude
  • Homework
So where does this come in, do students reflect on what they do in class each day? Do they reflect on there learning? On their sports practice? On there technological knowledge and practice? How well they did there science experiments? Could there be a system incorporated into their learning that is simple enough to gather data. Does it have to be a blog or could it be a short 140 character message. The ideas that come out of this are just simple, rate 6 questions on a scale from 1 - 5. Random questions could be used each day, and recorded against.
Students have mobile devices and a simple page that students goto and fill in would be all that is required, in the inital term no username and password would be used. No identification of students, all I am after is just straight implementation on an iDevice.
I looked last year at students developing a system to hold there literacy logs, in which students read a book and then filled in the questions related to the assessment based on what they read through the book. This has been a difficult project each year as the stakeholders and specifications have grown out of control. Also with the changes in technology now, other sites that we have invested time and money into have taken control of this.

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