formative assessment
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Get started using Screencasts in PE.
Shout, Shout by Hebedesign licensed CC BY NC SA Feedback is any teacher’s essential tool. The challenge for any teacher, is to question how much do our students retain from our verbal (and as PE teachers, our physical efforts)? Does our feedback improve student performance? Does our feedback aid the understanding of a task? Do we offer feedback to all learning styles? How could we solicit more discussion about our feedback within our class? Recently a lot of research has been conducted on the the optimal ways to give feedback and the importance of this on student learning. John Hattie (Mayer et al 2011) is a leading voice in this…
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Who appraises or offers you Feedback?
Two Faced Justice by Johnson Cameraface CC BY NC SA The dreaded word around the MYP PE faculty and classroom is ‘reflection’. Do we have to do another one – really? It seems you can tell when the end of a reporting period is up as the students are madly reflecting on everything they have learned and teachers roll their eyes in solidarity – reflection time again – please spare us. I read Jen Hatmaker’s blog post on being the Worst End of School Mom Ever and took some of this away as I thought about how I end each of my units and how I watch the slog over reflections,…
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Volleyball Assessment – Knowledge and Skill work
Like most PE teachers I cover Volleyball as part of my Middle school curriculum. Volleyball is very hard for students to learn as they really do have to go to meet the ball rather than let the ball bounce, be passed or kicked to them, they have to learn to move like no other sport I know and the concept of the way this team works together also creates confusion. I used to teach volleyball with some modified games where students could have a bounce, but it became clear that this caused many problems once we tried to play. Students were clearly moving away from the ball for a bounce,…
- formative assessment, iPod Trial, pegeeks, screencasting, Student Reflection, Teacher Reflection, Technology in PE
Burst Mode – T&F Day review
My school recently held two Track and Field days – one for Middle and one for High school. As a tech type person I decided to trial some apps for sharing technique but more to capture some flavor of the events over the day. I found that it would have been more useful to have a clear plan of use for the day, which apps and how to really use them, as some settings were more effective for different events. I used my iPod 5 and I didn’t have internet access on our field, so no real time sharing happened. But I did share images with some students on the…
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Screen-casting in Gymnastics and Dance
Dancing Troopers by Kalexanderson CC BY NC SA I have mentioned on twitter about using technology in my Gymnastics and Dance classes and thought I would delve a little deeper into this in a blog post. Last year I began my Gymnastics unit with Grade 7 students. This unit really focuses around Floor routines using balances and other tumbling and so I pitch it to the students with the importance of Team work and also on giving lots of feedback as the routines are very aesthetic and require students to think and be more aware of presenting themselves and on proprioception within their routines. I was using the typical…
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Assessment
We are having some great discussions at school at the moment around assessment. It seems that our students are overwhelmed by summative assessment and to be honest so am I. I have been trialing playing with more formative assessment this year and it is going well, but it still adds up to more marking and time away from feedback and advice in lessons (things slide when I am tired of marking…) but I thought it would generate some more questions. I pondered whether I needed to offer a ‘large’ piece of assessment to students – could I offer smaller pieces of work over time and forego the summative big piece? …
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Mastery and Failure
Last year I worked with Simon Mills to design a Badminton unit and after much debate and discussion, we decided to go with a very different approach to our unit. We had both worked in Japan and we had watched Japanese students working in PE using so much skill repetition to master skills rather than practice them. And so we decided to see how our students would cope with skill mastery as the focus of our learning. We used a basic “How to learn Badminton” type book that started off with warm up skills and we used these series of skills as the backbone of our unit. We didn’t know…
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How much is too much?
One Click or two by Kaptain Kobold licensed by CC BY NC SA How much work in a unit is too much? I would be the first to say it is likely that I am guilty of trying to do too much in a PE unit, but is it too much? How do you gauge what is acceptable and what is too much work for you as the teacher (or teachers if you teach across the grade level) and the students? I would like to try and quantify this if possible. Here are my ideas so far: It is too much work when – you can’t easily get the…