This new curriculum idea of #digitalstudies seems to be gaining a small amount of momentum at the moment. In developing the definitions for the four strands I have been thinking about what is going to underpin all of these strands and allow pupils to bring together what they have been able to do.
The obvious answer to this is blogging. Blogging I see as a very effective personal analysis tool for reflecting on learning which is taking place. The obvious example is this very blogpost itself as I am using it to reflect on the work I have done.
The less obvious answer is how to assess what a pupil has written. Starting this year I asked pupils from year 8 upwards to create individual blogs for uploading their work. Every post which a pupil makes is commented on by me often in great detail. However I have been thinking that despite the detail I provide the pupils need to be shown a clear ‘path’ for how to improve their own blogs. I also about the same time I was considering this went on an exam board course for ICT (don’t worry I wasn’t shown any answers) during which we discussed the longer ‘essay’ questions at the end of the exam. I reckon looking at my pupils they do struggle to write these essay questions.
When I looked at the markscheme for the essay questions I saw that they also used a fairly familiar levelling system for identifying how well a pupil has written an essay question. I thought why not use similar levels for assessing how a pupil writes a blog. This would allow me to very quickly identify how well a pupil writes as well as give them a structure for how to improve as well.
The following Google Docs link will take you to my first version of a blog assessment rubric which I will be introducing at school soon. Feel free to add, edit and make a copy of this.
