I Should Be Marking

Assessing Pupils’ Progress (APP) is the new buzzword of the hour in education. I must admit that my first thought was “That’s where I’ve been going wrong!” (incidentally, this is the same thought when I heard that “Every Child Matters”) but since it can effectively be used to replace the old level descriptors with a more compact and less arduous set of criteria it should actually make my life easier in the long run. There is a lot of talk about the need for creating portfolios and gatherng evidence, but thankfully the departmental cry of “It’s on the VLE!” once again comes into its own here (at least as far as I can see).

What we do need is a way of recording, storing and reviewing the criteria involved – and this is where I need help:

Lets say there are 40 criteria (8 for Level 3, 8 for Level 4 and so on…) and 3 assessed units per year. Each unit will only be able to meet some of the criteria and there will be overlaps so that the same criterion culd potentially be covered by several units.

Using Moodle I want each classroom teacher to have an online checklist of relevant criteria to mark as pass/fail for that unit in order to manually generate a level. I would also like that data to be stored so that an overall, cumulative picture can be seen at a glance. It would also be pretty much essential to be able to see/print a class set of criteria for report writing and such.

Ideas anyone?

Someone threw a statistic at me the other day – 1 in 5 pupils in school now has a Special Education Need (SEN). That got me to thinking – at what point are ’special’ needs not really special any more?

Anyone on the front lines will know what I mean. SEN booklets grow and grow, pupils with a variety of Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD) are labelled, sorted, sifted and given a crutch to lean on. I recall talking to one pupil about maths. He told me that I don’t understand. He has discalcula and so he can never do maths.

In fact he has been told that he has some mild discalculaic tendencies. But it’s easier to throw a medical term at someone than to actually try and solve the problem in front of you.

There was a brilliant example in a recent episode of House (S5, E17) in which a patient with frontal lobe disinhibition turns to his partner and tells her that their daughter doesn’t have an auditory disability, she’s just below average. The episode highlighted a number of issues to me; the need for parents to excuse the fact that half of all children MUST be below average, the need for the medical system to back this up and the need for the educational system to deal with the fallout.

I often joke in the staffroom that I have severe disfootballia. Perhaps we all just need to accept that many people with SEN are not benefitting from being given a label (or worse, an excuse) to hide behind. I can’t see it happening any time soon though…

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It looks like I’m still not quite meeting my quota of one a week – but in this case I feel justified. After a marathon marking session I’ve sent all of my GCSE and A-Level coursework off and felt I deserved a week with a bit less work related goings on. So there!

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So, to the point. I’ve liked the idea of screencasts for a while. If you’re not sure what that means, it’s usually a video recording of your screen with a bit of narration and possibly on-screen text designed to demonstrate something useful.

I’ve tried using screencasts with classes several times, but rarely with great success. If it’s a class I’m teaching then it seems strange to play a video of me talking when I can just, well, talk! I have tried using short screencasts so that pupils can quickly revisit individual aspects, but in a classroom environment it just seems to lead to too much distraction.

Using screencasts for distance learning could be useful – but then you’re relying on sufficient connection speed and the relevant piece of software being at home. I try to keep homework relatively simple in order to avoid all the excuses (and if the homework is a bit more challenging, then it may become more than just an excuse) and so I’m not entirely convinced there is enough benefit using that model.

Where screencasts really seem to come into their own is with teaching staff. I’ve started work on a series of tutorials for colleagues at my school called Super Moodles and most recently recorded a very off-the-cuff screencast following a discussion about Google Sketchup at EdTechRoundup. Now at the time of writing it’s only had 29 views, but the feedback has been positive and there should now hopefully be at least 2 or 3 teachers who feel confident to use the software with a little direction and can then take the software further and start introducing it to classes. Job done!

If anhyone HAS used screencasts effectively in the classroom then I’d love to hear about it – and see what I’m doing wrong!