forum

Forum and Year 13

Adam set up a forum in Moodledo for Y13 students following an Applied ICTA2 OCR. As a coursework task students were creating helpsheets on using more advanced features of Excel.

What I did

I set up a forum view and comment on each other's work.

Imonitored the forum though feltas this was a relatively small class of mature students I did not expect and did notfind inappropriate messages. Over a week each student mailed their help sheets and did receive some feedback. Participation was heavily differentiated - some students really got into it but others did not.

What was valuable about this forum?

I did feel that students did ask and respond to each other rather than asking more as the main source of information

I could access their tasks and work in progress and I could do this whenever I liked

They could in fact easily share

What would I do differently?

I would set up an example to get them started eg an exemplar message and attachment

I would begin this earlier as by the time the forum got going the placement finished.

Forums with Year 7

This student teacher’s study looked at using a VLE discussion forum to support Year 7 ICT peer assessment. The study took place over three lessons with pupil’s who had little experience of peer assessment or using a VLE for this type of task before. The students uploaded their work on a discussion thread shared it with given a pupil from a different group who was in another room. They were instructed to mark the work against a given set of levelled criteria, commenting on three good points and suggesting three areas for improvement. These were uploaded for the original pupil access for homework. The teacher was able to access these feedbacks to check for misunderstandings and review feedbacks. The pupils were able to make improvements to their work and discuss with their teacher.

The student teacher commented: Pupils enjoyed the activity, felt it was useful in their learning, and would like to do activities like this more often. The teachers involved also felt it was valuable and did not consume too much lesson time. It was a useful way of being able to review pupil learning and progress through the discussions they had on the forum.