We still used technology today. My students gave presentations about the 4-5 Web 2.0 tools they liked that they explored last week, using tools such as Animoto, Prezi, Voicethread, Glogster, and Popplet. All of them showed great skill with using all of their chosen Web 2.0 tools--and I didn't show them how to use any of them.
Sometimes teachers think they have to be experts at every piece of technology or software their students use in order to plan lessons where they show students how to use it step-by-step.....but that's not true. Sometimes you just need to point them in the direction of the tools they are to use, give them ample room to roam around and explore, and what students can learn on their own will amaze you.
But just displaying that they knew the tools and how to use them seemed like it wasn't taking their learning far enough; Sure, they were demonstrating their own knowledge, but how about doing some learning while they were displaying their learning?
In a previous post, I wrote about how I had my students help me make the rubric for this presentation. Today we used that rubric--and I mean "we." Each team's table had a whiteboard, eraser, and dry erase marker on it when they came into class today. After each group's presentation (while the audience sat dutifully listening and checking out the characteristics on the rubric in front of them on their netbooks), students discussed what criteria the presentation met and did not meet, wrote their final score for the presentation on the whiteboard, and then as a class showed the group that presented what scores they would give them. The team presenting gave themselves a score on the whiteboard as well. What the class agreed upon as a score was what score was going in the gradebook, so every team had to be prepared to support their scores with evidence from the presentation and the rubric.
These scores written on a low-tech whiteboard sparked some very intense discussions today. Students and teams had to defend their scores with reasons; if their rationale behind the scores strayed from the rubric, students were redirected to the rubric and told to revise their scores. Except for one class, students generally scored each other much higher than I would have; this was mainly because some students (in their words) felt sorry for the presenters and didn't want to hurt their feelings, or were basing their decisions on their first overall impression of the presentation, not the learning demonstrated or the rubric characteristics.
The intended lesson here? If students don't show me what they know and how well they know it, they will not get a good score. And what students are supposed to show and "what showing it well" is will always be detailed in the rubric. Or, as one student put it in her exit ticket, "In this class, we really are going to use the rubric."
What did surprise me during today's activity was a quite unintended and welcome lesson--a lesson about really showing what you know. Groups that were being scored scored themselves as well, and were allowed to defend their score if they thought they were being scored too low. However, their defense had to come in the form of displaying and talking about what they knew, not about how much effort they had put in. Students that I have not heard utter more than one complete sentence since school started came alive today when the class scored them lower than expected, talking about how they had used the web tools, integrated them, applied them...and then got up and demonstrated to the class that they knew what they were talking about using my teacher laptop hooked up to an overhead projector, logging in to their various web tool accounts at the speed of light, eager to show us everything under every tab labeled "my <insert web creation here>."
The unintended lesson? This lesson was for me, not them. I learned that scoring collectively in this way takes me out of the "judge" role, and allows me to facilitate the assessment process rather than be the assessment process. It helps to put the ownership of learning back into the hands of students. And when students take on ownership of their learning, they will own up to their learning.
The feedback I gathered at the end of class about this process (the first time I have ever done something like this) was overwhelmingly positive. Students liked being scored this way, feeling that it was "more fair" and "better because everyone talks about what you learned and didn't learn rather than stuff that doesn't matter" and "really interesting seeing someone else's take on your work."
I think they liked it because, in this instance, education wasn't something being done to them; it was being done with them.