My final project is a place where teachers can collaborate and work together to help one another with lesson plans or ideas for teaching critical lenses to their students. Therefore I will not need to provide students with any feedback for my final project. For this blog post I have decided to discuss how I might give feedback for an Inspiration assignment instead. (This Inspiration assignment would be a pre-requisite to a larger paper) I think a good way to incorporate peer feedback for this specific project is through blogs.
Since I now know that it is possible to post your Inspiration or Bubbl.us onto a blog, I think it would be really cool for students to be able to go to any student’s blog in the class to check out their projects. The students could even create an RSS feed so the entire classes blogs would be in one place. Each student would be required to comment on at least five other students’ blogs. They would be assigned five students to ensure that every student gets feedback. I think student’s performance would improve with my feedback because they would know which elements of their concept map are important, and which elements are unnecessary to include in their larger paper. They might be required to revise their concept map if their map doesn’t make sense or there are lots of important elements missing.
Inspiration Rubric
| | Not-Satisfactory | Proficient* | Strong |
| Relationships | No evidence of meaningful relationships | Relative importance of ideas is indicated and relationships are mapped | Relative importance of ideas is indicated and both simple and complex relationships are very effectively mapped |
| Communication | Information is not clear; very difficult to understand | Information is presented clearly and allows for a basic level of understanding | Information is presented and clearly allows for a high level of understanding |
| Exploratory | Thinking process is not clear | Map show definite thinking about relationships between ideas, themes, and the framework | Map shows complex thinking about the meaningful relationships between ideas, themes, and the framework |
| Concept map Blog | Concept map is not posted to blog | | Concept map is posted to blog |
| Comments for Blogs | Commented on no students blogs | Commented on 1-4 students blogs | Commented on five students blogs |
Modified from a rubric found at: http://dmc.umn.edu/activities/mindmap/assessment.pdf
Megan, first of all, I LOVE your wiki idea. I think one of the great things about teaching is the possibilities to collaborating and learn from other teachers. I would definitely find your wiki useful and would be willing to contribute my own material -- and look forward to getting ideas from other teachers there as well.
ReplyDeleteI also think you did a great job of finding ways to "quantify" aspects of the Inspiration assignment. At times, rubrics may seem tedious or even pointless, but yours ensures that students know exactly what is expected of them in order to complete the assignment successfully.