#ReflectiveTeacher Blogging Challenge Day 20: Curating student work
How do you curate student work–or help them do it themselves?
Well, it all starts with Google. Or rather, a combination of a cart full of chromebooks (or PC laptops), a small stash of iPads, a modest display of class desktops, and smartphones–students’ and mine–and Google.
And this year, a notebook.
What do they curate?
Of course in a world language class, students collect audio and/or video recordings, but they also need to collect authentic texts and their responses. Here is a list of several things I have students collect:
- audio of them singing the week’s chorus
- photos of them doing actions representing current vocabulary
- practice scripts
- running webmap vocabulary lists
- emergency class vocabulary
- personal pronunciation guides to relevant vocabulary
- recorded conversations
- short authentic texts related to Genius Hour and PBL projects
- summaries of/responses to said Genius Hour and PBL resources
- target language summaries of their findings for Genius Hour/PBL
- weekly English reflections on communication modes, goals, and proficiency
- reactions to picture books, magazines, etc. in the target language
- directions for constructing their portfolios
How do they curate?
There is time and a place for everything. In my class, we work on a class project Monday-Wednesday and then spend Thursdays on Genius Hour and portfolio reflection and assembly. (Fridays are set aside for enrichment, volunteer, remediation, and club activities at my school and it is AWESOME.)
Most of the regular class project things are collected through Google Classroom, and it is BEAUTIFUL. No more forgot-to-share, no more wouldn’t-let-me-turn-in. It’s all integrated with Google Drive. They either use a template I created for them–sometimes worksheet style, sometimes just with basic headers or instructions–or submit a link.
Everything Genius Hour is submitted to Google Classroom too, but in the form of a link to a blog on our class Pasiones blog where the information was typed up or embedded. This is handy for the portfolios later, so embed codes for Vocaroo clips, Glogs, Storify stories, or Pinterest boards can be copied into an embed gadget. Screenshots can work too where the comments need to be captured.
The portfolio itself is a Google Site template I rigged up from elinguafolio.org standards (you can use it too–just search for GECHS under templates when you create a new Google site!) I’ve found it helpful to create a Doc outlining what activities we’ve done that correspond with different proficiency modes like so:
Notice my snazzy ForAllRubrics badges! I bold the sections that are completely covered by activities from the unit at hand. I require students to submit 3 sections each 6 weeks, and you will see here they have 4 sections to choose from without having to create anything extra beyond what they’ve submitted for class or can find in their interactive notebooks.
How do I curate?
Aside from Google Classroom, I do a little extra collecting on their behalf myself, in part to make my life easier. I keep a portfolio webmix on Symbaloo each semester, with links to each student’s portfolio alphabetized for easy checking (in case they forgot to link to Google Classroom or I need to refer to them for examples or comparison). I also started keeping an Evernote notebook of what should be in their interactive notebooks, using stunning examples from their classmates. I haven’t gotten the swing of it fully, but it’s a way to keep information available to students and parents without having to release the precious notebooks to the wild
And everything else is either on Google Classroom, the blog, or their portfolio sites!
