Tech Meets AFL - with one iPad

It is well documented how technology can impact positively on Assessment for Learning.  An app or online student response system such as nearpod or socrative will allow teachers to engage students and assess their learning through student response systems. They are excellent for pitching the work at the right level for different learners and indeed for pinpointing exactly where your students are.  They do require a whole class full of smartphone, tablets or similar devices or even just a computer.

In September I am excited to be leading an Inset session on AFL.  I know that there is still plenty of time but given that there are so many strands to think of and ways to approach this subject I need to get ahead and start planning now.  Furthermore, I only want to present a few ideas as I would like to leave room for other colleagues to share the good work they do too.  I hope to bring a bit of technology into play as well as numerous other activities. I think it worth adding at this stage that technology will be restricted to a certain extent as I will only have one iPad.   So, there is plenty for me to think about.  I want my colleagues to leave the session with ideas (mine, or someone else's) that they can put into practice in their classrooms.  

I think I am going to start with an image that will hopefully get the room thinking and contributing without even uttering a word.  I will arm the room with a handful of pens and warn them that no words should be uttered.  I want to demonstrate how this method - the catalyst, the intrigue - will get students focusing on a topic and demonstrating, through written word on the board and through mime, what they already know.

Here's the image I propose using:

There should be plenty to work on there, I am sure you will agree.

Hopefully, that will get the room buzzing - once I allow my colleagues to speak, of course!  So, next on the agenda will be some technology.  Without a class set of tech tools to work with I am slightly restricted. However, there are ways forward.  Decide Now whose praises I have sung before here, would play an excellent role in helping to decide criteria for a piece of work.  As the teacher, I could set the criteria (as in the picture below) and in groups students could discuss whether they felt these were appropriate criteria for the suggested piece of work. Or, perhaps with the one iPad in a group of four I could allow the group to propose suggested criteria and make the wheel for the rest of the class.  With the same tool I could provide with all students a sample piece of work (or a completed piece from the class) and with a spin of the wheel and an area selected all students in their groups could engage in discussion about the error or particular topic highlighted. Those are just a couple of ways forward with Decide Now, but I think there is scope for further use. 

If I wanted to make further use of the iPad I might be inclined to use cloudart.  This simple app is easy to use and students will quickly see what the particular goal is here.

If I project this cloud art image on the screen and use my interactive whiteboard  blackout screen(remember that?), I could slowly pull down the screen and reveal, one by one, the words that make up the success criteria.

Finally, I want to empower my students to be in control of their work and think for themselves. Every year, religiously, our students slot the departmental mark grids into the front of their folders.  A bit like an unwanted gift they look at it once or twice and then do not bother looking again unless they are reminded to. I want to change this process. I might not be able to link this to an app but something tells me that I could somehow link in google forms if I had that flexibility at my disposal.  In the meantime, I am happy to resort to paper.  Very simply the mark grids will contain the usual information about what a piece of work graded at A* means but there will also be some tick lists for students to refer to before submitting their work.  There will be opportunities also for a friend to cast their critical eye over the work too.  Simple, but hopefully effective.

	Steps to the top	Me	Critical Friend
A*	I have used lots of link words
	I have checked accents
	I have checked my verbs
	I have used a variety of tenses
	I have given opinions and justified them

If I wanted to bring some technology into this element of AFL, I could ask students to read through a few of their friends' work and get them to record on voice record pro (or something similar) a synopsis of one of the pieces of work they have read.  They could provide a list of strengths and weaknesses and some suggestions for improvement for the whole class to listen to.  The rest of the class then decide if it is their work that is being analysed and devote some more time to improving their work before submission.  A good way forward for controlled assessment, I would suggest.

Over the course of a whole term I will encourage my colleagues to put into action any of the ideas that they heard about during our TeachMeet Fest (yes, that is right - our Inset is made by us, for us!).  We will experiment on Tuesdays, tweet about it to share our discoveries, perhaps blog too and I hope we can get a bit of a following of the idea on twitter.  I hope you will join in the fun and follow the tweet stream on #tryoutuesday.

If you have any ideas about this topic I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments box below.

Photo credit: Policy exchange