Tracking

 I like to track the work that my students complete as we go so I can have an eye over everything and know what needs some focus. We use Hapara Workspaces as a whole school and the workspace itself creates a spreadsheet of the work on that particular workspace. I don't tend to use these as I like to have everything in one place for all my classes.

I list out all the tasks for a standard / project and then link the students work from the workspace. This spreadsheet is shared with the whole class so they can see where they are up to. As I get the links from the workspace, only the individual student and me has access to their work they can't see each other's work.

Link to copy of this year's spreadsheet (names have been removed). There are tabs along the bottom for all my senior classes.

As a Creative Arts Department, we needed to make sure that we were entering all the students in  our classes for a "full" course that enables them the ability to achieve enough credits in our subjects for a 1/5 of their NCEA requirement.

To this end, a spreadsheet has been set up that includes all of the subjects, student names and the standards. Totals are kept and then we can see at a glance that all of our students are being offered enough credits in their courses.

Link to a copy of this spreadsheet (with the names and student details removed)

As the students are completing work and results are coming in, they are being recorded on this same spreadsheet and graphs drawn. This gives a visual guide to who is doing well and who might need some extra support across the whole department. 

The colour codes on the results are something that I have been using for a few years now. Pink - NA, Green - A, Blue - M and Yellow - E.

I have also just started tracking how many credits are being achieved by each student in graph from. There is not much there at the moment but this will give a visual guide as to how each course is going in terms of how many credits each student is achieving.

This spreadsheet has been shared with management so they can see at a glance how the Creative Arts Department is doing overall over the year.

Self Tracking for Intermediate Tech Coding Planning

 My inquiry this year is looking at how I can get students to be self motivating in their project work. Part of that problem is knowing where they are within a project and knowing where they are within the assessment process.

For a while now, I have been making standard breakdown documents for my students. 

• Here is a Year 11 example on the class site
• Here is a Year 12 example on the class site

I am not sure if my students use these to be honest but they have been really useful for me to ensure that I am covering work that will give them access to all levels of achievement. I have recently discovered that you can do a checklist option on a doc which you can tick and it crosses out in a very satisfying "i have done that" kind of way. I think I will redo these sheets to include these to see if I can get my students to use them to track themselves. We already use a class shared spreadsheet for tracking. 

Recently, we had a department moderation session where we were looking at the planning and marking of junior and intermediate projects.  Mrs Anderson shared the sheet that she uses to track the evidence for computational thinking. (I wont share hers here as it has student work on it with names etc). 

A copy of this was made and feedback from the moderation process was put under the grid of descriptors as the moderation went along. This was very useful, having lots of eyes of fellow tech teachers on my planning and seeing where the gaps are. I then used this to highlight in yellow where I needed to add things.

Link here to this. document

I then cleaned this up to be a version that is useful to me to make sure that I cover everything that is needed on my site for that mBot project.

Link here to cleaned up version.

I put this onto my class site in the assessment area for this mBot coding project but realised that it is not particularly useful for the students as it uses the language straight from the progress outcomes.

It was when I was converting this document to the more student friendly version that I found the checklist option on docs. I will use this version with my two coding classes in the next tech rotation to see if it is any good and do any changes needed to make it better.

Link to evidence collecting doc

Link to where it is on the class site

My hope is that we can all make a copy of this doc at the start of the rotation, share it with the teacher and use it to link up the evidence documents as they work through them from the class site. This will give them a very visual indication of where they are both in the project and the assessment.

Getting NCEA classes organised at the start of the year...

It is always a bit full on at the start of a new year. students settling into new years, classes and courses. Getting the routines down so the rest of the year can be as smooth as possible.
Part of what we have been doing in Design and Visual Communication this week, is setting up the student's new sites to put all of their design work on.
What we have been doing this week is part of the way that I want to support students to be more self managing within a multi level NCEA class.
I made template sites for them this year. All the students know how to make a site now, so to save some time and give them a scaffold as to what to put in each project online, I made templates.

Here are the links to the templates :-

Level 1 Level 2 Level 3

I was a bit more free with the Level 3 template and not so descriptive of what goes where on purpose.

I like to keep all the links to the student's work all on one spreadsheet so I can keep on top of where they are in a project and an easy link to all of their work.

As well as this spreadsheet that makes it easier for me to see the whole picture, the students have individual tracking sheets for each project.

I put links to these on my over view too so I can easily see where the students think they are up to.
Here is where they are on the class site :-
Level 1  Level 2  Level 3
I hope that this helps the students have the confidence to realise when they have done everything and conversely, when there is still work to complete.