You may be wondering, how exactly can I use the Amicitia social network as a means to assess my students? Well, wonder no more as I am going to show you some useful ways to use your groups, set up for your classes, to help assess your students.
Using the social networking technology that is available helps you tap into the tools your students are currently using. They are posting minute-to-minute updates on Facebook and Twitter and making connections with one another. They are already online, why not use those same solutions to expand your classes? Amicitia on Romae.org helps you do just that as you can create groups for each class or subject you teach. You then can invite your students to create accounts on the Amicitia network and add them to your group. The settings for your groups also allow you to make them private in order to keep others from joining your class’ new collaborative workspace.
Types of Assessments
You are only limited by the ways you can conceptualize your assessments. I am going to list a few examples here of the types of assignments I have created using the Amicitia.
- Reading comprehension – students answer a series of questions using Latin
- Collaborative – students work together to solve a problem, answer a question, or conduct a unit review
- Creative/Responsive – students formulate their own answer to a problem or create a solution of their own
Methods for Integration
I listed three different forms of assessment that you may wish to employ as a homework assignment. Using the features of your group on Amicitia, you may wish to integrate them into your class in the following ways.
For any reading comprehension types of assignments, ones that may require Latin composition or even English responses (grammar, mythological stories, or just general plot answers) you will want to use the Forum feature found within your group. This way you can post a question, or a series of questions, and your students can reply.
Your assessment will depend on how you grade – if you grade on completion you can just look at the students who participated and give them their grade. If you are going to make corrections, you can either do so fully or give your student suggestions – the best way to leave suggestions is to use the @ feature, where (like Twitter) you will type @ + the username of your student. They will then get a notification that you responded to them directly and they will be able to sift through everything and see your response right away when they log in again.
Nota Bene: This is also why I ask my students to create accounts with a specific formula like first initial, last name, and year. Anyway where you can just glance at a username and know who it is works. You don’t want to have to dig up a reference sheet or something to know what students did what. It should be easy and painless for you!
When you want students to work together on projects there are many ways to get this done – but it depends on what you are doing. You could have students use the Docs feature found in the group to have students create a “doc”, much like a webpage, to collect and even curate new information. For example, you may want students to research a particular god or a cultural aspect of ancient Rome. Have the students create a Doc and work on it as a group. You just have to make sure that you have enabled the Docs in your group admin settings and have also allowed access for students otherwise you can create the Doc yourself and allow your students to work on it (this is useful if you don’t want just anyone in your group creating Docs).
You can also have students post a response to something, for example, just toss out a question based on something you’ve done in class. For example, do you think the conspirators were correct in assassinating Julius Caesar? Post a question like that in the Forum and ask that your students post a response. You can set in your directions what constitutes a full “post” and if you need, place a general rubric for such assignments in your group’s Documents section (so your students can reference it later should they have questions about your grading policies).
Another way to incorporate some sort of collaboration in your class is to have students conduct their own online review before a quiz or a test. The simplest way to do this is to use the Forum feature but make sure you specify how you want your participation online to look. I usually say I won’t give credit until a student both posts a question AND a response. I usually ask them to post both in the same post (that way it is easy for me to give credit) unless they are the first ones to respond to the assignment (they will have nothing to answer!). You could always give 50% for a question and 50% for a response, too, but it depends on how you grade.
The key difference here from a collaborative assignment is that the student is responsible for the product themselves. They have to demonstrate some sort of unique response to a question or maybe create a solution of their own. It really depends on the assignment, and how you grade, but you could use the Forum or the Docs features to elicit your students’ responses. You could also have them upload their finished product to the Documents section of your group (as a Power Point or a Word Doc, PDF, etc.).
If you are using a 3rd party web-based application, for example, you could have students post the URL to their finished project, too. This is another strength of the Amicitia is that everything is collected in one place for easy reference and access. You could use the Forum for that, create a topic for your assignment and have each student post the URL of their project.
Some Final Tips…
Another great thing about the Forum feature is that you can close a topic once you have passed a deadline. This is highly recommended that way students cannot go and post beyond the deadline and claim full credit. They will be locked out and can’t post unless they get permission from you. If you state this policy upfront at the beginning of the year, then you won’t have any problems.
Use the Documents feature to upload any class materials that may be referenced throughout the year. For example, you may want to upload your class syllabus and other policies so that students can reference them. As I mentioned in another article, you can have your students print it out and sign an acknowledgement form and bring that back to class. It is a way to ensure they are enrolled in the Amicitia and in your group AND you won’t have to worry about printing out forms! Just collect them from your students and file them as you need!
That’s it for now! See you next time! If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.