Transforming Assessment Praxis

I am on a pilot of a new NZQA Best Practice Workshop model, which is around Transforming Assessment Praxis.

While it hasn't been all inspiring, as most of the work that they have been talking about over the last five weeks has been ideas that I have been working on with my students for the past couple of years. It has made me more aware of what we are trying to do at HPSS. Knowing the learner and working with contexts.

As well as looking at Naturally Occurring evidence

While watching the three hour session tonight that I missed last week, around What currently drives you current assessment practice, What students value, Future shifts, Modes of assessment and naturally occurring evidence. I have been sent two assessments to moderate by another teacher, looking at these tonight and putting the ideals that I have been working through, I have been able to make some changes to evidence statements. While it is an assessment in Digital Information, database creation, the assessment is written in such a way that it allows for a student to develop their own context, yet also offer ideas for those students that can't think of one, or it does show the students what the rigour of the assessment should be. Having the conversation with the teacher on the phone while modifying the assessment through Google Drive has allowed for some great conversations to happen about how the assessment could be delivered, and what contexts should be included to help develop students ideas around rigour.
Evidence statements have now been changed to allow for a screencast of the database working by the student to show how it would function.

But the highlight of the work was on area of the assessment that had been developed which was on to show skilfully or efficiently as required as part of the step up of the assessment. This is the masterpiece of the assessment in my opinion, without even knowing it or putting it in for assessment sake, this allows for naturally occurring evidence of the technology level 2 achievement standard around planning to be included. So a 6 credit assessment, is now a 10 credit assessment.

In the presentation I was watching tonight, was included some information on overlaps. This is something I think originally looked at when the assessments came out, however I think I was turned off at the amount of evidence required by the standards. Having a better understanding of the standards now and evidence required through my role in the subject association helps me to now develop better assessment outcomes. A feature of what we are looking at as part of the Workshop15 in the holidays. To many teachers are talking about the amount of evidence needed for assessments now. Why are we not thinking smarter and allowing the technologies that we use everyday to assist us.

I know look forward to the next two weeks where I get to put my plans for the task into action and develop an assessment resource 

Things to consider …

Prior to writing your assessment resource, you will need to consider the following:

• Your goal
• What the student voice has told me
• Student input into context
• Knowing my student
• Documents which will inform my assessment resource (Achievement Standard, Conditions of assessment, Clarifications documents)
• Modes of assessment
• Variety of ways to collect evidence

My Goal, to look at how naturally occurring evidence and authentic contexts can help develop engaging learning that can be used for overlaps of assessment.

Data representation unplugged - continued

This week I had an email around last weeks Data Representation work. In the email there were a few comments that I found rather interesting. I include part of it below. The whole entire focus is one around assessment, at the junior level. I must say I read this 5 times trying to understand why? Why the subject requiring 32 credits per semester? Why the assessment driven curriculum?
To be clear, the following is not the school that I work at, we work towards Learning Objectives based on our Learning Design Model and NZC 2007, we report on curriculum level and progression, based upon rubrics.

We have a junior diploma which is all about credits, each subject does 32 credits per semester.  If an assessment is worth say 12 credits, they'll get 12 credits for getting excellence, 9 for merit and 6 for achieved or something like that.  Then students get A/M/E for their junior diploma overall based on how many credits they got out of credits available.

IMHO it's awful because our junior curriculum is assessment driven.  Sure we get to decide on the topics and how the assessments work, but once that has been done we still get stuck having to balance covering what's needed for the assessment, and trying to make it catered to their interests.  See, we decide on the topics before we meet our classes and then we're locked in, there's not much room for "Hey you guys are fully interested in binary, let's spend a week on data representation (and make some movies like Gerard's class did" because we have to give them a decent shot at their assessments.

To be clear, a week in my classroom for this module, is one and a half hours on a Thursday. As part of our SPIN, Special Interest Module. I include the following on what is being covered.

The work I am developing towards is Technological Systems under the Technology Curriculum, The work you saw as part of the videos and page was on part of the Computer Science module that runs over 13.5 hours

I am using the basis of the computer science badges that the University of Canterbury, Computer Science Education Department developed. 

Students will then work through algorithms and finish off with HCI.

Data Representation

The core concept of this topic is the binary digit, which is the basis of all data storage and transmission on digital computers. Students should be familiar with the role of a bit, combinations of bits (such as a byte), and their use to represent numbers, characters and images. This work does not include compressed representations (e.g. mp3, jpeg).

For a student to be successful they need to :

Demonstrate the ability to work with binary and hexadecmimal numbers by showing how to:

• manually convert between binary and decimal for numbers up to 8 bits.
• Demonstrate the ability to manually convert between hexadecimal and binary for arbitrary numbers, and to convert between hexadecimal and decimal for numbers up to 255.
• Demonstrate how to count and add in binary.
• Explain how an 8-bit characters are typically stored on a computer.
• Explain a system for representing colours with numbers. This might be one of:

• Web page colour specification (6-digit hex values)
• Colour picker in publishing software that allows RGB or HSV values to be chosen as three numbers
• Photo processing software that gives the RGB or HSV value of chosen pixels

Demonstrate a data representation that has a choice of bit sizes, and explain the significance of the different representations. Examples that could be used include:

• 8-bit and 16-bit characters
• 24-bit and 8-bit colour
• Other Examples could include:
• 16-bit and 8-bit sound files
• 56-bit and 128-bit encryption
• IPv4 and IPv6 addresses
• MAC addresses using MAC-48, EUI-48, and EUI-64
• MIDI representation of notes, patch numbers and channels

Convey the concepts of data representation to someone who doesn't know about the topic. This might be:

• A short video suitable for non-experts explaining a key aspect of the topic
• Introducing it effectively to someone who is considering doing the module themselves
• Creating effective quiz questions (e.g. in Peerwise)

The work they did last week in their second class was conveying a concept of data representation suitable for a non expert.

resources for print design, digital media, graphic novels

Resources are sometimes hard to find when teaching some concepts and knowledge in digital technologies or technology.

I have been planning with a fantastic teacher of english the last couple of days around "digitally creative through text". We have been planning a specialised learning module for our year 9 students. We have four hours a week for the semester. We are looking at developing a comic relating to the text that the students are studying, be it short story, poem or a novel. We are looking at developing skills around Digital Media using Print Design, under the Technology Level 4, Characteristics of Technology http://technology.tki.org.nz/Technology-in-the-NZC/What-does-learning-in-technology-look-like/Progression-Diagrams/Characteristics-of-Technology-Learning-Progression-Diagram

Now finding resources to support this, we have a great librarian who when given a concept has helped us find resources to support the teaching. On the shelve in the library office was a teacher guide on how to develop a graphic novel, with copies of the graphic novel.

The ministry has a great website called down the back of the chair. http://www.thechair.co.nz/, if you don't know your schools login, like many people, give them a ring on

The people at the other end of the phone would love to hear from you. 

The codes you are after are 711004(teacher guide) and 711002 (Graphic Novel)

Teacher guide

Graphic novel, not bad a $0.50c a copy!

The teacher guide has a fantastic section in it, in how the graphic novel is created.

This is a step-by-step run through of the process I used to draw the Arohanui graphic novel. Everything you see here was drawn on the computer using a programme called Photoshop. This panel was one of the first I chose to work on, mainly because it was relatively simple and a good one to work out my overall approach on. If I could get this panel looking good, it would give me confidence for my many pages to come. 

The author explains why he uses layers in Photoshop.

Flattening entails using the lasso tool in the too bar to section off different areas of the picture and then filling them with colours you have chosen.

What the final outcome looks like in the form of the graphic novel.

I like the ideas of the students going through and highlighting the skills and techniques that the author used to develop his outcome. In this unit I am looking at the Characteristics of Technology - Level 4.