Re-imagining Formative Assessment with Digital Tools (Part 3)
In Part 3 of our series on Re-imagining Formative Assessment, we look at the power of practicing self-reflection when developing students’ Learning to Learn skills. This week's Formative Assessment activity, Hold up a Mirror invites students to reflect upon the knowledge and skills they have attained, as well as considering the areas they still need to work on. While simple in essence, such reflective practices can form the basis of a powerful learning tool that can be developed to encourage metacognition and a deeper understanding of the strategies that work for individual students, leading to a more personalised learning experience. Educator, Marija Petreska explores how we can use Flipgrid and OneNote with this activity to create ‘safe-spaces’ for reflective journaling, as well as for charting progress and exploring strategies for success.
Formative Assessment Activity 3: Hold Up a Mirror
Original idea
This activity focuses on developing student's ability for self-reflection. The first time this activity is conducted, it is good-practice to keep the questions fairly simple until students become more practiced at reflecting, but the questions can be adapted over time to encourage students to think more deeply about how they learn. Some simple starter questions might include:
What can I do?
What can’t I do yet?
How can I do better?
How can you Reimagine this activity with Flipgrid?
Simply create a grid with a Topic for each question you wish to ask. Since this is a self-reflection activity make sure you activate the Video Moderation Settings. This means that you as a teacher will be able to review the submitted videos, and decide if the videos remain private or become visible to others.
What are the benefits of using Flipgrid here?
The Video Moderation features in Flipgrid provide you with flexible options for how you wish to help students develop their reflective thinking. In particular being able to create, what is in essence, a private video journal (by ensuring the Video Moderation Settings are always switched on), has the added benefit of making students feel that they can be authentic and honest in sharing their thinking without worrying about what others might think. In the early stages of developing reflective thinking, this can be very reassuring for students. It also enables the teacher to review student's responses, and provide them with helpful feedback to scaffold deeper reflection and develop their Learning to Learn skills.
Extend the Learning
Encourage students by adding a Vibe. A Vibe is a teacher comment to the video that is seen only by the student. In this activity you could add Vibes to responses of things they say can't do, providing ideas of and small challenges that can help them take steps towards improving. By adding a personal comment you make students feel valued, and that you are listening when they communicate with you.
If you use OneNote, you can create two sections in students' Private Notebook in OneNote Class Notebook that you name: Things I can't do (yet!) and Things I can do. Ask students to put all their I can't do response videos in one section and can do responses in the other. Have students go back and review the sections periodically (e.g. after a semester). Invite them to use their own 'can and can't do' lists to self-assess progress, and importantly, to identify any gaps in their learning that still needs to be tackled.
Watch Marija's Top Tips video and find out how to use some of Flipgrid's most useful features including Video Moderation Settings and Vibe.
More on Formative Assessment with Digital Tools
This blog has been created as part of our series of Re-imagining Formative Assessment with Digital Tools. Each week this month, we'll be releasing a formative assessment activity, re-imagined with Flipgrid along with a hints and tips video from Marija. Look out for the releases on Twitter @immersiveminds
Marija Petreska is a former classroom teacher and Immersive Minds Associate. For this blog Marija created all of the images used in the Flipgrid grids, and has been instrumental in the development of our new course focusing on Digital Tools for Formative Assessment (coming very soon!). Get in touch if you'd like to find out more about using digital tools in the classroom, or browse our Professional Development Courses online.
