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As AfL becomes a regular part of teaching and learning in our schools, Julie Leigh looks at ways ICT can support it.
Consider for a moment how ICT is used in your school to support AfL.
Is ICT used by teachers to give feedback that is personalised and direct to individual children?
Are teachers able to use ICT to annotate work and to highlight successes and areas for improvement?
Are they making good use of options within word processing or spreadsheet software to give feedback to children by using:
- the highlighter tool;
- tracked changes;
- callouts or text boxes?
The different colours of the highlighter pen can signal to the child the successes and areas for improvement against the learning objective. This feedback helps children to recognise what they need to work on, but they no longer have to start the work again because the annotations made by the teacher can easily be removed. Once amendments such as these have been incorporated or rejected, the end product is free of highlighted feedback and the process may be repeated as children continue to refine their work.
In what way are children in your school taught how to evaluate, amend or adapt their work? Do teachers model the process using children’s own work to show them what they need to do in order to be successful, for example showing children how to deconstruct text or even just present their finished article?
With ICT, children’s work can be scanned and displayed and annotated as part of the modelling process. If an interactive whiteboard is used, this work can then be viewed by the whole class and children can contribute to the improvements in a whole-class setting.
Some schools now also use a “Visualiser” which enables an instant copy of work from children’s exercise books to be displayed so that the teacher can mark key features against a checklist or the learning outcomes that were shared with the class at the start of the lesson.
For those children who may struggle to read comments, have teachers considered using recorded voice feedback within tracked changes?
Are teachers in your school experimenting with ways that children can use ICT to support peer and self-assessment?
Using a split screen option allows children to be provided with a checklist on screen which they can use when assessing both their own work and the work of others. This could be used with response partners or in the plenary. Too little use is made of the split screen facility.
e-pals
Some groups of small schools have developed evaluation partners who operate via email. Children have email partners in other schools who work together to evaluate one another’s work. In the context of a small school where there may be only a few children in each year group, this allows children to have ongoing discussions about their work with children of the same age.
Want to find a partner school? Visit the e-pals conference on the OCN . (OCN Conference > Everyone > Curriculum > ICT Curriculum > e-pals)
Personalised online learning space – online portfolios
A key feature of ICT is the way that assessment evidence can be collected during the learning process and stored for analysis and how it can demonstrate progress over time.
Do children in your school know that they can store work that they feel represents a significant achievement in their online learning space? Are parents made aware that they can see their children’s improvements online without waiting for parents’ evening? (Digitalbrain provides every school/child with this facility.)
Are children taught how to use their online learning space for their homework? Do they submit their tasks online? ICT can be highly motivating in encouraging children to complete homework.
Teaching Assistants in mainstream and special schools can record children’s work so that children with special educational needs can share their successes on a regular basis with their parents, for example, using a digital camera or scanner.
Now consider how ICT could be best employed to support and enhance AfL in your school.
– To what extent are these practices already in place in your school?
– What would be the next steps you would need to take to develop the use of ICT in this way?
– Agree a timetable for implementing some of these ideas and a list of expected outcomes that can be used to evaluate the use of each ICT resource in supporting AfL.
– What training do you need? Invite an Advisory Teacher for ICT to run a staff meeting training session on “How ICT can be used to support AfL”.
– Agree a time to share observations on the impact of using ICT in this way.
Julie Leigh
Co-ordinating Adviser – ICT Specialist
Extracts from “Excellence and Enjoyment: Planning and assessment for learning”.
