There is a disparity between work completed within the context of in-school curriculum and the pressures and constraints associated with external assessment.
In New South Wales external assessment, like the School Certificate, the Higher School Certificate and now the national literacy and numeracy assessments where over 1.2 million students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9 from more than 9,000 schools across Australia will sit the first tests in literacy and numeracy suggests that standardised testing is the measure of a school's success in the eyes of the government and many educative bodies.
These tests, (currently) pen and paper tests, that are undertaken in seated, silent and structured examination rooms or classrooms, are throw-backs to the beginning of last century. (The computer assessment for NSW school certificate students is the exception as an on-line test).
The correlation between student performance in this kind of testing and the possibilities available to both learners and teachers grate against the open-ended nature of using virtual classrooms, wikis, moodling etc. to assess a students understanding of texts, contexts and their place as producers of texts.
Friday, July 4, 2008
The process...
The process of editing and improvement of both vocabulary and sentences became clear to the students using Inspiration software, Microsoft Word and Smartboard Notebook software.
The sentence changed from the example above to 'He has shadowy stubble, as he sits in the dark; feeling gloomy, miserable and alone. He faces the shining light of the fire while his unshaven face shows despair.'
The students could post comments on a wiki reflecting on the process and and what they learned. The wiki also provided them with the opportunity to use some of the new vocabularly they had learned during their classroom sessions. They were required to write (over a five week period) once a week and include some similes, metaphor, onomatopoeia and personfication in their writing.
At O'Connor…
I was working with a group of extremely reluctant Year 11 students using John Steinbeck's novel Of Mice and Men as inspiration for a creative writing task. The focus of the task was to create a character's voice and include detailed description in their creative writing. The students initially wrote a piece of text that included very perfunctory language, with included little description and virtually no similes, metaphor or other literary devices.
Eg. He has dark stubble, sitting in the dark. Feeling sad and alone. He has a shining light of a fire. His face being unshaved shows dispair (sic).
Limitations
Several limitations became apparent during the research and this, most notably, affected the use of ICTs with senior students. Assessment tasks for senior students in Queensland have to be submitted to a district panel in order to conform to the requirements of Queensland Education and electronic forms of those submissions are unacceptable, i.e. if students create a wiki to demonstrate the collaborative nature of their work the wiki will not be accepted as a viable text for assessment. If students present an oral presentation, the text submitted is videotaped or recorded for DVD and fundamentally alters the nature of the dynamism that is inherent in a text that relies implicitly on audience involvement. Similarly, in the Higher School Certificate in New South Wales, the final examinations takes a pen and paper form. The implication is that it is acceptable for teachers to integrate ICTs in their teaching and learning of course curricula but ultimately the major external assessments pedal back to a time where straight silent rows of students writing by hand is still a measure of their educational worth and a measure of their learning and our teaching.
The plan
Our first step in the action plan was to create a wiki. The aim of the wiki was to communicate our ideas about the action research, share resources and readings that we found useful or that may help us create a framework for our project. During the Summer School there was some discussion, in workshops, that suggested that some teachers of English still resist the notion that integrating technology within our subject area is, or should be, a mandatory part of our subject. There was much discussion about the different technologies used within each of our classrooms and the range of those technologies was growing, in fact, burgeoning!
There were several things that needed to be considered in this project including that we
* use different syllabus documents
* work in different systems
* work with different age groups
* the cultures of our schools are markedly different
This is a concern with regards to equity in education. Technology comes at a cost. The price of software licences in schools can be prohibitive for poor, small schools. The new roll out of hardware, under the Rudd Government, suggests that the equity issues will be addressed but the notion that every student can access the internet easily and freely from both school and home is erroneous.
During our project we shared many things. The most obvious was that the time it took to implement action research in our school and report on it was onerous to say the least. We also shared the panic of presenting our findings. There was an overriding sense that as teachers we were overstepping our boundaries and venturing into the world of academia. It also became obvious that when discussing different syllabuses that there wasn't a common language for us to share between states. In terms of encroaching national curriculums this is a major problem.
Notions of virtual classrooms, discussion boards, the different ways we construct texts in our classrooms as teachers, how we deliver our teaching material, and the ways we instruct students about creating multi-modal texts using ICTs, all presented fertile sharing fields.
There were several things that needed to be considered in this project including that we
* use different syllabus documents
* work in different systems
* work with different age groups
* the cultures of our schools are markedly different
This is a concern with regards to equity in education. Technology comes at a cost. The price of software licences in schools can be prohibitive for poor, small schools. The new roll out of hardware, under the Rudd Government, suggests that the equity issues will be addressed but the notion that every student can access the internet easily and freely from both school and home is erroneous.
During our project we shared many things. The most obvious was that the time it took to implement action research in our school and report on it was onerous to say the least. We also shared the panic of presenting our findings. There was an overriding sense that as teachers we were overstepping our boundaries and venturing into the world of academia. It also became obvious that when discussing different syllabuses that there wasn't a common language for us to share between states. In terms of encroaching national curriculums this is a major problem.
Notions of virtual classrooms, discussion boards, the different ways we construct texts in our classrooms as teachers, how we deliver our teaching material, and the ways we instruct students about creating multi-modal texts using ICTs, all presented fertile sharing fields.
Inspiration for a research project
Four teachers attending the Australian Summer School for English Teachers at Deacon University decided to undertake an action research project. This was an initiative by the Federal Government to lift the profile and status of teachers across the country.
We met at the summer school; Julie Bain, Louise Cullen, Karen Farrow and Paul Gough, found common ground in their discussions about using and integrating information and communications technologies (ICTs) within their teaching practice within their respective schools and systems. Three of the teachers, Louise, Karen and Paul teach in Queensland, while Julie teaches in New South Wales. Karen, Paul and Julie are secondary school teachers, while Louise teaches primary school students. The range of technologies that are used in their teaching provided a focus for their action research into the different ways teachers use ICTs in their individual teaching practice, with the aim of finding some common ground in terms of teaching/learning/assessment.
We met at the summer school; Julie Bain, Louise Cullen, Karen Farrow and Paul Gough, found common ground in their discussions about using and integrating information and communications technologies (ICTs) within their teaching practice within their respective schools and systems. Three of the teachers, Louise, Karen and Paul teach in Queensland, while Julie teaches in New South Wales. Karen, Paul and Julie are secondary school teachers, while Louise teaches primary school students. The range of technologies that are used in their teaching provided a focus for their action research into the different ways teachers use ICTs in their individual teaching practice, with the aim of finding some common ground in terms of teaching/learning/assessment.
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