Today's @TeachThought #reflectiveteaching post asks:
How do you curate student work–or help them do it themselves?
Here's how I do it:
- Exercise books - lower down the school (I teach a couple of Y8 classes this year, last year I taught a Y7 one) I still use good, old-fashioned exercise books. I get pupils A4-sized hardback ones as I find soft covers quickly start looking scruffy. There's nothing particularly special about what I do here except that I really try to reinforce good 'academic housekeeping' habits on the pupils. And I reduce all my handouts down to A5 so that they fit nicely in the kids' books without paper sticking out at the edges. The idea is that pupils learn to take pride in their work.
- Google classroom - whenever I set homework now I post it on Google Classroom. I think this has the potential to be very powerful indeed as a means of helping pupils curate all their work, but it's very new as yet...
- RealtimeBoard - this web app has been the single biggest change to my teaching over the last 18 months or so. For sixth form groups, it is just about the only thing I use (albeit now supplemented by Google classroom). Its power as a platform on which to curate work is, to my knowledge, unsurpassed. Here's where you can create an account.
- Evernote - I use this extensively personally (including for my own research). The ability to tie Twitter into it with the use of IFTTT is a real boon. I use a recipe which sends all my favourited tweets to an Evernote notebook for future reference. But I have also started pushing the use of Evernote to pupils as a means of organising their digital lives. Now that it is possible to attach reminders to notes it has the potential to be a one-stop-shop repository for everything needed to cope with life.
I am well aware that some schools are ahead in getting kids to keep digital portfolios of work. We are not there yet, but it's coming...