Week 3 of eLearning

My class finished up their third week of eLearning today.  Tomorrow is a scheduled non-school attendance day so today ends the school week.  I think most teachers are still figuring out how to balance and cope with what’s changed over the past couple weeks.  A historical event is playing out before our eyes and the learning environment for our students (and us) has significantly changed.  Even with all this being said, I believe we (using the collective educator we) are making progress. We’re adapting, learning new skills and attempting to reach students through a different medium.  I believe Llana’s Tweet sums up my thoughts fairly well.

Since student work is now being turned in digitally teachers now return the work in the same manner. Right now students complete assignments and return them through SeeSaw (at least at the k-5 level in my district).  The assignments take many different forms.  Some of the them are digital while others are pulled from district adopted resources.  Most of the assignments include some type of written response or visual model.  Assignments are sent out once a day and students send them back to the teacher completed. Once a student’s finished assignment hits the teacher’s SeeSaw inbox the teacher has the option to accept the work, send the work back, or add comments.  Usually teachers add a comment about the work and send it back to the student. Here’s where the feedback/analysis comes in.  Take these two different examples.

       

With limited information available, a couple questions come through my mind when taking a look at both of these responses.

• Does the student understand the question?
• What made the student decide on using multiplication?
• Why did one student use 40 and the other 3.5?
• Did one student forget to move the decimal point?
• Which student has a better understanding of the concept?

Identifying misconceptions and offering feedback based on that analysis is becoming more of the norm with eLearning. This is part of the regular classroom experience, but is emphasized even more now as contact is limited. Asking the student for more information and/or a well planned question to encourage the student to rethink their answer might help here. Giving feedback through digital means isn’t a simple task.  It takes thoughtful consideration and thankfully I’ve had the student more 3/4 of the year so that helps frame some of my own thinking.  As I contemplate how to give feedback in a more meaningful way, I’m planning on using a coding key for SeeSaw activities.

This is similar to the NY–M retake sheets that I used during non-learning days.  I’m hoping this is helpful (along with the feedback!) as we continue into week 4 next Monday.  Enjoy the weekend everyone!