Just another reflection?

After the presentation (or lack there of) of our focused task, I think that we did quite well. I feel that we completed the task the way we were supposed to. We may not have made it as interactive for the assessers of our work, but I feel that the movie that we created was informative, creative, and engaging. I think that students and adults alike would enjoy reading, listening and watching our movie. There was one thing that I feel we could have done a little bit better.

I think that the movie was a little long at 7 minutes. I think a 3-5 minute maximum on the movie would have been sufficient, but, to be honest, I didn't have any say in the creation aspect of the movie. My partner and I had waited until the last possible moment to begin the final phase of our task, which was not as big a mistake as one may be led to believe. I feel that we did very well. Not just well for our self-manufactured time constraints, but well in general. I think that the planning phase of our task took longer, and to put it all together just took a larger chunk out of our day.

My partner spent the majority of his day putting the movie together, and I spent the majority of my day putting together the rubrics. In building the rubric for assessing my own students on this task, I tried to make it appealing to them, and I tried to color code it in order of importance. The bottom portion of the rubric, was I felt, the most important. It was the base, the dirt, the earth of the task. Without it, the rest was just satisfactory at best. Chances of the task doing well without the base being fulfilled were slim. The rest of the criteria were based in order of importance. Use of technology was one of the requirements of the task, so I chose that second. Lastly, still important however, was the organization of the material for the presentation. I put that last because the students would be able to discuss and prove themselves and why/what they did in their final response. They would also be able to give a sort of self assessment in their final response to substantiate their choices.

I chose not to include numbers on their rubric because I would rather them be focused on more constructive assessments than just a 1, 2, 3 or 4. I think that the words being there does not stress them out as much ("Oh, I NEED a 4 on this"). They can say "Oh, I'm getting there", or "it looks like I need to do more work next time). Even the title of my rubric is less intimidating than plain old rubric. I think it leads students to feel that they aren't being assessed as much as being provided feedback, as the title reads "How did you do?"

The rubric that I created for our peers to assess us was geared towards how we would do as teachers creating a task including technology. I felt that feedback from our peers about how they feel we would be able to interpret the tasks and essentially the program of studies through a technological lens. I hoped in creating it that our peers would give constructive feedback on how they feel we could better ourselves as teachers, not at how we completed the task - and it worked out! Our peers gave us great insight, questions, and concerns about our task, how we chose to complete it, and how that reflected our teaching image. Their feedback was very helpful, and creating the summary of their assessment allowed me to look at my practice while reading their responses, and see how I felt about topics/issues, and how I would deal with them as a practicing teacher. It wasn't just another reflection to me.