If this is reflective learning then we should throw away the mirror

I’ve just picked up a post on LinkedIn (here) that labelled the the above sheet as “Developing reflective learners”. Really???

To save your eyesight, here are the two student comments from the bottom of the sheet:

I think that I did well on talking about the formation of ox-bow lakes and identifying river processes. However, I didn’t do well on the formation of waterfalls and advantages and disadvantages of channel straightening.

Continue reading →

Seven ways to implement differentiation in Yacapaca

My thanks to new member Yasmin Sheikh of Whitfield School in Barnet for asking why we show each question for 10 seconds before displaying the options. I realised that although we have worked like stink build opportunities for differentiation into every point of the Yacapaca process, I have never really explained them. Here, then is chapter and verse.

Implicit differentiation: thinking time between question and options
This gives students time to challenge themselves to get the answer before receiving the restricted possibilities of the options. This is a higher level of challenge, and it gives the student who manages it a great deal of confidence. You can gently encourage this by applauding the behaviour, but please don’t push students to do it if they don’t feel ready.
Differentiation by time: Question speed
Different students think at different speeds, but this does not correlate particularly with ability. Yacapaca times each answer from each student with an accuracy of Continue reading →

Could we automatically analyse your students through their writing?

I have been experimenting this morning running Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) over students’ peer feedback responses. So far, all I’ve done is analyse the last 50,000 responses in aggregate, and only on a few dimensions. Here is what I found:

The ‘personal’ and ‘formal’ columns are comparison averages generated by the system. I assume those are from bodies of text written by adults.

What stands out to me is how much more Continue reading →

Using Peer Feedback statements in plenaries

My thanks to Beth Evans, of The Queen Elizabeth’s High School, Gainsborough for this idea.

Beth wrote “I did screen shot one question that came up whilst I was testing a quiz I had written and used it as a plenary to the previous* lesson as part of the critera setting for the next task.”
* I think this should have been “next”.

This is a fantastic idea. It should be easy to train your students to screenshot particularly challenging choices and Continue reading →

Now you can see the question feedback statements your students are writing

I am sure you have already noticed the “write a feedback statement” pages that we salt through quizzes now. We ask students to write feedback statements and then vote for the best ones. Until now, you have only been able to see the few statements that I have published here in the blog. Now, you get a complete log.

Access the log via More -> Feedback statement log

It is really interesting to Continue reading →