I have deliberately chosen the word feedforward as opposed to feedback as a focus for my work with struggling readers and writers in my English First Peoples 10 class.  One of the key learning outcomes at this grade is to be able to make connections through writing—a task my students find difficult.  At the end of June my students will be required to write a compare and contrast response on the provincial exam. On a literal level, my students are able to find similarities and differences but “going deeper,”–delving in at the interpretive level is much harder for them.  For this assignment I am endeavoring to incorporate technology as a means to move my students’ writing forward.  My goal is to improve student writing through effective feedforward on student blogs, googledocs and Livescribe pencasts.  This assignment and its focus is influenced by MClay and Mackey’s (2009) research with Canadian English teachers in which they advocate for distributed assessment:  “We see distributed assessment as a sharing and dividing of assessment responsibilities that serve to help teachers and students alike to develop metacognitive and critical awareness of the work under construction” (p.118).

My students are new to blogging—they have just made a blog using blogger—and are moving towards commenting on others’ blog posts.  This week in class we will focus on providing effective feedback to others through the blogs commenting feature.  We will be visiting Mrs. Yollis’ class blog that provides great help and guidance for novice bloggers—that is definitely us!  Although Mrs. Yollis’ students are elementary age the information is very relevant; my class has grade 2 “buddies” at Eagle View Elementary so I am using their mentorship role as a way to introduce the skills and build upwards.  We will start out slow– responding to our elementary buddies’ posts and then moving to peer responses.

Another area to provide feedforward is through peer editing of written work.  Within the next to two weeks I would like to have my students proofreading each other’s work and using the commenting feature on goggledocs.  The commenting feature on googledocs is very easy to use and allows comments to be inserted along the margins of a written document.

The provincial writing rubric is a six point scale that denotes the ability to infer beyond the literal level as a 4 out 6–this marking scale means very little to my students.  One of our tasks will be to co-construct criterion that clearly breaks down or transfers the marking rubric values into “student friendly” language.  As we create the criterion students will be required to blog about the process and respond to  others’ learning posts.  I am excited about the possibilities and look forward to blogging about this experience!

References

McLay, J., & Mackey, M. (2009).  Distributed assessment in OurSpace:  this is not a rubric.  In A. Burke & R. Hammett (Eds.), Assessing new literacies:  Perspectives from the classroom (pp. 113-132).  New York:  Peter Lang Publishing.

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