Repartee, the quick ping pong like bouncing back and forth of quick witted, ingenious remarks is a favorite past- time of mine and a fun thing to do with students. Something about the connective lightning speed or lack of speed and riddle like nature is fascinating. The speed of the return adds so much to these conversations and we all encounter those retrospective ‘should’ve said that’ type of moments. Research shows a similar vein when giving students feedback on assignments and tests. Expediting student feedback return increases the learning that takes place in a learning experience. Ultimately feedback would provide a student with goals and next learning steps.
Typically, within assessment comments and goals back to students will fall in to fairly distinct categories, allowing an educator to create a ‘bank’ of comments in response to perceived needs in students learning discipline, creating efficiency when returning assignments and test. Further too, this also creates a ‘group’ situation where some students receive similar comments. This creates an easy situation where the teacher can then cluster those students with similar comments to then direct them to a certain resource that will help develop the required skills.
Associated with comments students also require the next steps in the form of a goal. Currently we are developing our goals in close relation to our guiding rubrics. Once the students are identified on the rubric within one of the six traits of writing, the next level is interpreted as their immediate goal.
As teachers of 7th grade English our ultimate aim is to take the comment and goal and combine this with recommended lessons that students may take to make systematic improvement to their writing. Fortuitously, we have two resources with the required depth that can provide this level of support for our students, making this formidable task less daunting than if we had to create the resources from scratch. Combining our English support website that contains key learning points and notes we can create a specific repertoire of resources that will target the learning needs as illuminated by our rubric.
In order to actually move this project off the ground we needed something that will allow us to complete a number of things at speed. The application or plugin would be required to be fully customizable, allowing us as teachers to create a database of categorized comments with recommended learning steps and hyperlinks or references to actual lessons. This would create a brilliant blend of specific differentiated learning utilizing our resources of Write Source and WPP writing lessons.
11Tree ingeniously has created a plugin that works with word that allows us to bring all of our intentions together. This plugin allows for a customized database of comments, hyperlinks and references to write source lessons. Our project would work to piece these resources together to allow close to instant feedback, recommended goal and associated lessons.