Marking with Markin

For weeks I have had the program Markin 4.0 on my computer, but I have not come around to using it until today. I had some problems at first finding out how to actually open the students' work in a way that let me use the program, but after some frustrating minutes I finally managed to make it work. My first impression is that this program can actually help me a lot in the future. I do not think it will revolutionise the way I assess the papers, but I believe the students will get much better and more detailed feedback than I have been able to give them earlier. Including statistics that can show them black on white the frequency of certain mistakes will hopefully show them that I have a point when I mention these mistakes in my comments, and including links to resources on the web where they can find more information on the issues can also help some overcome these mistakes and errors. Correcting papers is still a time consuming activity, and I do not belive Markin can help me speed the process up all that much, but if it can help the students get rid of some of the most frequent mistakes, it will, as time goes by, be of great help to me in the future.

Thank God, it’s Friday, by the way. Wish you all a pleasant weekend. I already know how I will spend most of mine – correcting more papers using Markin 4.0!

Native Americans, Glogsters and "The Bottle Queen"

New week, new topic. This week: Native Americans. I really needed some activities this week which would make the students work without me hanging over their shoulders. I had promised them discussions in smaller groups this week (more discussion on Obama's inaugural address), and I could therefore not be in the classroom with the others all day. My solution was to provide various sources on Native Americans and to ask each student to make a glogster on a topic related to Native Americans. Returning to the classroom after approximately one hour, I found all the students busy creating their own digital posters; they were eager to share ideas about how to make interesting posters with pictures, text and videos, and asked for more time because it was funny. Running out of time and wanting to spend some time on factual texts and literature, too, I have therefore asked them to finish their glogsters at home and to publish them on their blogs. If you want to have a look at some of the results, you can visit Henrik and Caroline's blogs.

Working on Native Americans, we have also used a couple of text which we found on the internet. "The end of the Native American way of life" is a text from the BBC pages and tells about how the US government defeated the Indians, whereas in "Native American Voices" you can read about indigenous peoples in all parts of America.

I find it useful to use short stories or extracts from novels when teaching the various topics. This time we plan to use two short stories by William P. Kinsella, "The Bottle Queen" and "Panache". In between parent-teacher meetings, correcting papers and fighting the flu, I have not managed to get around to all the details on how to use these stories yet. It probably will not be all that revolutionary anyway, but hopefully both stories will provide food for thought and discussions with the students. Time will show.

Maori, Aborigines and a hole in the wall

I guess many teachers have experienced that when we talk about cooperation and projects, we think of something completely different than our students do. Time and time again I have seen that in a group of four they quickly split the given assignment into four parts, and that each of the group members work more or less on his/her own finding the information required. Is this cooperation? In my opinion, it is not. Most of the time the students do not have a clue about what the other group members are talking about during their group presentations, and if one member is missing on the day of presentation, the remaining members are not able to fill in for the one absent.

Inspired by Dr. Sugata Mitra's project "Hole in the wall", my colleague Ingunn suggested that we allowed only one computer per group in a project on the Maori and the Aborigines. In this way the students were forced to cooperate, and the result was that what they presented to the others in class was known to all group members. Personally, I found this to be quite a success. Most of the groups worked well together, and there were many discussions in the classroom about which articles they should use, how they needed to structure their work when the access to computers was limited, etc. This project also made me aware of the fact that it is not necessary for all of the students to have their own computer in front of them all the time, and I try to keep this in mind when planning my teaching.

When planning this project we also decided that the time frame would be quite strict. It is my belief that we often tend to give the students too much time for group works and projects, and that the more time they have, the later they start working. We therefore said that they could only have approximately five hours for the preparations, and that they were to present their products at the end of the second day. Again this worked well; most of the groups (all teachers know that getting 100% of the students to work really hard all the time is impossible) started working at once, and the products were ready by deadline. It was actually quite impressing to see how much they had managed to get done in such a short time, and we had some very interesting and humorous presentations.

You can read Ingunn's reflections on this project here, where you also find some responses from the students. If you want to learn more about the project, have a look at this google document.