Course work marking (again)

April 9, 2012

Its course work marking time again and time to note down some thoughts. Although what with AIDA not being ratified we will be moving to Edexcel GCSE, so there I am perfecting the system just as we drop it. I am also going to ignore the rant that builds up in my head this time of year about the inherent problems of course work… that if its all about my tracking systems, time management and ability to get students to correct work then thats not really a fair reflection of some students work (‘nuf said)

Points
- How to do more marking as I go along rather than just say thats ok. I need to be getting in to the nitty gritty of is it a 3 or 4 earlier and letting the students know. Our current Y10s are uploading work into Moodle which speeds up tracking & marking, but I decided to give ABC grades instead of numeric grades because the survey and database work are the big Y10 tasks and its good to give students easy to understand feedback. Although now I feel that to build up their understanding of the mark scheme earlier would be worth the effort even if that means saying “good db work thats 2 marks”
- How to transition into numerical marks whilst staying with Moodle.
- Planning we continue to do badly with. Students are awful about writing comments in their plan. Why not have another go at a separate project diary in Word (or blog if students wish). Angela says at her school if students are missing comments in their diary they get detentions so they learn to do that quickly.

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Posted by richard

Starting off on Dida

September 19, 2007

This is the second year that I’m teaching Dida Unit 1: Using ICT.

The first couple of classes I did an intro explaining key vocab such as AIDA, SPB, Eportfolio, copyright, creative commons and Flickr.com. The last 3 we didn’t do very well with last year and as I went to the Marking Dida training up in London where they told us they were going to be really strict, I thought we would get those concepts explained early.

The next difficult thing the students come up with is planning. They don’t like reading the SPB and they don’t like working out what to do themselves. So for Lesson 2 we looked deeper at the SPB and made them do a simple mind map using Open Mind software (another important skill). We set up a folder structure that would you believe it follows the main tasks on the Mindmap and SPB (structured thinking again ouch).

On lesson 3 we started putting more sub tasks in and boredom started setting in. Now according to the scheme of work I should be doing Active Book Chapter 2 Who What Why How (is that right?) but I find it quite abstract. Lots of discussion and talking points, not much for them to do.

Head of dept rightly said try to inspire them, its the beginning of the course. So I used the video of the NSPCC director (Ch 2 Digimodule) and talked about channels of communication, the C in ICT. We identified the channels, the audiences and what each of the audience wanted. Then did the classic Radio 4 vs. Radio 1 to identify how design changes to cater for different audiences (the low abilty group didn’t want to do it for Radio 4 tho.)

Much better.

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Posted by richard

Notes from Dida Assessment

April 3, 2007

Last week I went to a Dida Assessment course (GCSE equivalent qualification). We spend 2.5 hours going through a level 1 paper then 2.5 hours going through a level 2 paper, both of which got distinctions. I asked the moderator how long he expected marking a paper to take and he recommended 1 hour. Even if it takes half an hour I have 100 of these to mark which means 50 hours work extra work next term (minus the 5 hours of Y11 per week who will have left and who’s papers I will be marking.)

Other news from the moderator
The walk throughs are up on the Dida site and should be useful. We used them extensively in the training (no doubt they will break this link, try searching for ‘getting the standards right’ or gtsr).

Copyright will be treated even more strictly in 2007 than in 2006. Students must act as though they were working as professionals for the organisation in question (ie. a Make Space club or for Unit 3 the London2012 organising commitee). So that means forgetting that the project is actually a school project. I assume that as the Make Space club is a non profitable organisation (as is the Make Space organisation) you can get away with using Flickr.com’s creative commons database. However I have doubts that for London 2012 you can use photos with the non commercial licence, as London 2012 is actually a limited company.

Arcane? don’t you believe it. I think we should be teaching our kids these things. Only problem is that your average GSCE student doesn’t want to know, they have be copying, and watched everyone else copy, images from the internet with impunity for all of their school lives. Try tell them that they can’t.

Here are some notes I took Assessment Notes

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Posted by richard

Moodle for DIDA

November 6, 2006

I’m assessing our AIDA taught coursework for Y10 and I’m up to my eyes in plastic wallets of kid’s printed work and typing grades into Excel. Surely thats where Moodle can help us, get it submitted electronically, kind of a half way house towards them creating there own portfolio.

Marking on Moodle is a bit slow, but hey at this stage its enough to know that the work has been submitted or not. Also, the grade book and csv export is adequate but could do with refining. Hopefully there will be improvements in the next upgrade (we haven’t upgraded to 1.6 yet).

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Posted by richard

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