goals
goals
Providing personal and individual attention to struggling students.
Nearly all the students I had targeted have transferred. Other students that fit in this category have responded better to high-structure (clear expectations and reliable consequences) than to personal attention.
Develop more effective methods for providing feedback on student writing using the Internet.
I’ve tried a variety of methods and programs, none of which is fully satisfactory. One problem is that commenting tools aren’t yet very well developed. There are developers working on better software to support this but it’s not ready yet.
I can use digital highlighters to mark passages I want to call student attention to, but when students go to edit such texts the highlighting appears as html code, which can be confusing for them.
I can use the comment function, which is faster and easier than handwriting notes on papers, but my comments need to be appropriate for the public, since these will be visible to everyone. I can’t put grades in the comments section.
I have tried using email responses, but email messages from the website are blocked at school, so this is unreliable and confusing.
Currently, I print each students paper and hand it back with a few hand-written comments and a grade. I augment this with online comments.
I’m giving students more time to comment on each other’s work, hoping to transfer some of their fascination with “My Space” to academic work. Since I have a lot of sophomores and they are all writing and commenting now on the same blog, it’s easy for them to see and respond to one another’s work. This seems to be working reasonably well, though the process isn’t very developed yet. I have heard students talking about which essays were “really good” and going to read these.
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