Entries Tagged as 'Assessment for Learning'
This week I tried to use wordle as an assessment tool in literacy. Children were shown a stimulus image of a man looking over the edge of a well and were then asked to write 100 words of character description. We then took everyone’s writing and put it into wordle.
The results were great! What became very clear was that the children were using phrases like “he looked like…” and hadn’t really used powerful descriptive words.
The great thing was that we could actually see the frequency of the words used by the size of the words in wordle.
Next week we’ll do some guided writing and repeat the process which should hopefully show a real difference.
I really liked this as an assessment method and would recommend that people tried this in their own classes.
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Tags: Literacy·wordle·Writing
Here’s a word cloud that I made using all the comments left by children on our school website. I think it makes interesting reading.
It also occurred to me that this could be a really useful tool for looking at the quality of vocabulary that children were using in their writing, for example if your lesson was on character description and using powerful adjectives etc you could get the children to paste their initial descriptions into a shared doc, then generate a word cloud. Then at the end of the lessons do the same activity and compare the differences between the two word clouds. Hopefully there would be some interesting discussion generated and some clear development!
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Tags: Literacy·wordle·Writing
Just wanted to put down a note about how were using Senteo in the classroom. Simplest way to describe it is think who wants to be a millionaire ask the audience. Each child has a key pad that they can use to answer questions in Smartboard software. It gives you really clear assessment of areas of weakness for the chgildren and I’ve found it really useful whilst revision for the SATs.
Each child has their own logon so you get really specific information as well as a class overview. The software also lets you ask ‘instant’ opinion questions which can be useful.
We’ve used it for :
- Assessement of specific Numeracy skills eg multiplication methods
- Science revision
- Listening assessments in Spanish
Really we’ve just touched the tip of the iceburg and next year things should really take off.
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Tags: assessment·revision·senteo·spanish
