Collaboration, Blogs and Feedback

Dancing Troopers by Kalexanderson licensed by CC BY NC SA

My G8 students are beginning their annual Dance unit.  This is usually met with not much enthusiasm.  I have to admit that my dancing shoes are not as polished or practiced as many other PE teachers, but over the last few years I have had the opportunity to work a little with Sara Quigley, a fabulous Dance teacher, and she and I have worked hard to put together a Dance unit about dissecting dance and then putting a Dance together with all its segments and joining bits and it has been more successful than other attempts….

This year I decided that after such great feedback via screencasting, that I would again use Screencasts in my work with students but really focus on the feedback via commenting on student blogs.  The process will work a as such:

1. Students will be filmed using Coaches Eye (on my iPad3) at the end of each Dance lesson to record progress thus far.
2. I will do a small screencast on 3 groups each lesson (leaving 2 more with no comments) and export them to my DropBox public folder.
3. Students will then get these films and either embed on their student blogs with a short post or link with privacy settings to those who are offering feedback
4. I will have groups of student comment on other groups as part of ongoing feedback using a Feedback rubric.
5. Students from Yokohama Int’l School (YIS) and Western Academy Beijing (WAB) will be invovled in feedback to my students as part of their ongoing formative feedback loop.  Ken Forde (WAB – @kenforde) and Alex Thomas (YIS – @alex76thomas) have very thankfully come on board for this 2.5 week experience.
6. Students will post/offer feedback for 5 lessons.
7. Students will be assessed on the quality of their feedback to others as part of their Criteira D grade (IBO MYP PE)

This is a long process but something that I think will be worth while.  A big thanks to all students and staff who have assisted in this project, we will get back to you when it’s all done to see how the process went.

Update: Link to my class blog and instructions