Last wednesday saw the publication of ‘Successful Futures’ – the report to the Welsh Government by Graham Donaldson, the man tasked with conducting an independent review of the curriculum and assessment arrangements in schools in Wales. This blog post started as an attempt to provide a summary of the proposals in the report, but at […]
GIGO – The validity of assessment data. #28daysofwriting
Image credit: Garbage Collector by clement127 – CC Licensed on Flickr There’s an expression in computing – Garbage In, Garbage Out. It doesn’t matter how pretty your graphs are, if the data underneath is garbage, you may as well not have bothered. In all the conversations I’m seeing around rethinking assessment at the moment the […]
Clearing out my teachers toolbox
Image credit: Toolbox by Royalty Free. CC Licensed on Flickr.com I’m currently on secondment to the Hwb team, so I’m not in school. One of the things this break has given me is a chance to reflect on some of the things I’d be keen to take back (or just take) into my classroom. Some […]
Making Marking More Manageable
“I’ve just spent a cheerful hours of my time writing a program on my computer that will tell me instantly what the volume of the mound was. It’s a very neat and sexy program with all sorts of pop-up menus and things, and the advantage of doing it the way I have is that on […]
How digital badges could revolutionise ICT teaching – a plan.
There’s a growing buzz at the moment around digital badges, and I’m going to try and put down my thoughts, specifically on the following: Why I was initially so negative, and why I now think I was wrong One possible vision for the delivery of ICT embedding student choice and badges. I first came across […]
The Dichotomy of Feedback
Although I haven’t read his new book (yet), I’ve been thinking quite a lot about John Hattie’s idea about giving feedback being the most effective tool in a teachers armory. That seems to be drawing a growing number of people into ever increasingly sophisticed rubrics – breaking down responses and drawing up ladders that show […]
Marking stickers
In our dept we’ve been looking at various ways of making peer and self assessment more meaningful and at the same time helping to speed up the time it takes us to mark students books at KS3. We’ve been experimenting with various forms of comment stickers, and I thought it would be useful to share […]