With all the focus schools have on digital technology use (BYOD, Flipped Learning, etc.), it is important that students develop their digital literacy, to use these tools appropriately and responsibly.  For schools using Google Apps for Education, a free online project-based video curriculum has been created to help teach and learn practical digital skills.

1. Go to the Applied Digital Skills site and sign up.

2. Once you’re signed up as a teacher, you can share with your students the self-paced lessons via your Google Classroom.  I have picked out these links below, which are particularly useful for helping students to develop their online research and presentation skills using Google Apps for Education:

Research and Develop a Topic

Create a Presentation All About a Topic

Organise Files in Drive

Create a Photo Journal in Google Docs

The Common Sense Media site for educators (https://www.commonsense.org/education/) also has access to a range of relevant resources and lesson plans for teaching students about digital literacy and citizenship.

At our school we use BrainPOP with our teachers and students.  The site has a library of hundreds of videos, which are all searchable by topic.  The videos are generally no more than five-minutes long, and using the two main animated characters, Tim & Moby, BrainPOP simplifies topics for children, making them engaging, fun and easy to follow.

At the conclusion of the video, students have the option to complete a variety of follow-up activities:

As BrainPOP integrates with Google Apps Suite for Education, all of these activities have built-in functionality that allow students to submit responses to their teacher. This submission may come in the form of a quiz response, student-created concept map or completed vocabulary worksheet, for example. Students can then track their submissions, grades, and feedback by navigating to their My BrainPop page.  Teachers have additional access to the BrainPop Educators page, which is included as a link with each video and offers user-submitted and BrainPop-created lesson plans, printables, and instructional resources.

BrainPop also enables teachers to create and assign their own quizzes for a given topic. They can write their own multiple choice or open-ended quiz questions, or they can opt to pull items from BrainPop’s library of over several thousand questions.

Some of the content can be relatively high level for primary children, as the site is designed for students from 8 to 14 years.  This why there is a sister site, BrainPop Junior (included within the subscription package), which has been designed for children from 5 to 8 years.  In addition, there is BrainPop ELL for new English language learners.

I designed Classroom Flipped to provide access to BrainPOP topics that match our IPC curriculum:

As a tool for Flipped Learning, BrainPOP has many benefits.  Students can research plenty of child-friendly resources using this platform.  It can save teachers lots of time searching for appropriate videos and enables them to spend more time as facilitators of learning.  The platform is also compatible with mobile devices such as iPads and smartphones, which makes it another great application to use as part of a BYOD initiative.

Assessment is any method used to appraise the knowledge, skills or understanding that a student possesses.  By providing constructive feedback to students on their work, assessment is fundamental to the teaching and learning process because it can show teachers (and their students) what areas of students’ performance needs to be improved.

Unfortunately, assessment of ICT, the predecessor to computing, has not been effective at achieving this end for most schools.  One of the main criticisms made by Ofsted about ICT in England for example, has been in the area of assessment.  In 2011 it was judged as no better than satisfactory in 61% of their sample.  In my view, there are three systemic challenges to the assessment of computing:

1. Until recently, the assessment framework itself has been based on ‘levels’, which have been fairly abstract and not always easy to interpret.
2. Many schools do not have an organised system of digital portfolios set up in which students’ work in ICT/computing can be consistently recorded and easily accessible.
3. Traditionally, schools have applied an assessment model based on the learners’ grasp of discrete bits of information rather than how they use that information in context to solve complex problems. This is particularly true of the former ICT curriculum, which focussed more on students acquiring a set of skills rather than on knowledge and understanding.

The shake up provided by the new computing curriculum offers an opportunity to put this right.  In the process of adapting to this new curriculum, I have been developing an integrated assessment, digital portfolio and digital badge model using Google Apps for Education to help address these systemic challenges.

1. The Assessment Framework

The expert panel, commissioned to review the national curriculum stated that all assessment should be linked directly to the content of the programmes of study.  This means that the computing programme of study should be broken down into a series of statements in which to inform the learning objectives of lessons.

The text below, which is derived directly from the 2014 national curriculum programme of study for computing, shows these statements.  Its organisation makes it easier to form judgements about students’ achievement of and progress towards the statutory attainment targets.  And it’s this assessment framework, which forms the basis of everything else that follows.

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This is a framework for assessing attainment in computing based on the work by senior computing lecturers, Miles Berry and Pete Kemp at the University of Roehampton.  Taking a pragmatic approach, they’ve grouped the statements into ‘bands’ from 1 to 8: this numbering could be used in place of the old levels, if schools are committed to using the old system of tracking progress.  I’ve also included in this framework relevant standards (in purple) provided by The International Society for Technology in Education.   

2. Digital Portfolios

The next step is to ensure that a system of digital portfolios is in place.  A portfolio is just a purposeful collection of student work, which can provide direct indicators of a student’s learning experiences.  Digital portfolios are particularly useful because they can serve as an administrative tool to manage and organise work created with different applications, which can then be shared on the web for the whole community to see.

As Woodward (2000) points out, the value of portfolios is thoroughly researched and their use in education is well documented.  By demonstrating the development of knowledge, skills and understanding over time, digital portfolios make valuable assessment and learning tools.  To ensure deep learning though, it’s not enough for students to simply showcase a series of digital artefacts they have created.  It’s also important that students reflect on the work they have produced, and this can be done by simply getting them to write about what they have learnt.  This helps to reinforce students’ knowledge and understanding, which complement the skills they demonstrate through the creation of digital artefacts.  In order to get students into the habit of developing decent digital portfolios, I’d recommend that the process is started early – the last couple of years of primary school is a good time to start.

Project work lends itself particularly well to this process of building up a digital portfolio.  A link to a game created in Scratch for example, with some commentary and reflection about the process of making the game, would provide evidence of a number of attainment targets.  Over the course of the key stage, a diverse portfolio of evidence of student learning should emerge, which meets all the curriculum requirements.  At any time, it also provides teachers with a snapshot of which attainment targets a student has met, and which still require more evidence. I therefore recommend that a list of links to students’ digital portfolios be placed on the same spreadsheet as that used for assessment of students’ attainment.

3. Assessment of knowledge, skills and understanding

In order to motivate students and at the same time provide assessment for learning opportunities, digital badges should be linked to the system of digital portfolios.  A digital badge (embedded into the digital portfolio) is just a mini-credential, providing students with a validated indicator of accomplishment in a particular area.

Students earn digital badges according to the areas of learning they demonstrate across the statutory attainment targets of the computing curriculum.  Below are the badge designs and descriptions, which I have adapted from the ones provided by makewav.es.  Different digital badges are awarded across the three themes of the computing curriculum: computer science, digital literacy and information technology.  Within each of the themes I have ordered the badges according to the level of achievement they represent.

[item title=”Badge Information”]

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It’s important from the outset that this badge information is shared with students in a straightforward language that can be easily understood .  I would even say that the badge information itself should be embedded into the students’ digital portfolios, so that students can clearly identify what knowledge, skills and understanding they need to demonstrate in order to earn a particular badge.

Linking Assessment with Digital Portfolios & Badges

Assessment of students’ attainment feeds into the digital badge system quite easily, with badges for each of the attainment targets linked to relevant evidence on a student’s digital portfolio.  If a school already has Google Apps for Education, which is free, it makes sense to make full use of this google ecosystem to integrate the assessment of students’ attainment with digital badges and digital portfolios.  I have created this integrated assessment model in order to automatically issue digital badges to students upon having had their attainment graded by the teacher.  It means that students do not need another set of login information to access their digital badges and portfolios, and schools do not need to pay for premium services.

Below is an example of an assessment template that I would use to archive links to students’ digital portfolios, grade students’ work and issue students with digital badges. As the video explains underneath, this template is linked to a student badge assesment template, which is shared with students via Google Classroom for them to embed into their digital portfolios. When the assessment template is filled out, I use the Google Add-on, autoCrat, to merge the ‘Comments & Badge Display’ sheet of this assessment template with a “Badge code email template”. In this way, students automatically receive an email with the badge codes that they have been assigned. They then enter these badge codes onto their student badge templates, which automatically populate digital badge images onto their digital portfolios.

As well as addressing the systemic challenges of assessment, my intention with this has been to make the process of assessment easier for teachers to do and more effective in its outcomes for teaching and learning.  This assessment model is highly automated, freeing up time for teachers to focus on properly appraising students’ knowledge, skills and understanding across the curriculum.  For students, the digital portfolio and badge system allows them to reflect on and keep track of what they’ve learnt, informing targets for what comes next.  It gives parents a much more meaningful picture of what a child has learnt, and what they still need to study.  Finally, it allows school leadership and the inspectorate to more accurately track year on year progress of students.

Concluding thoughts…

First and foremost, assessment should be directly linked to the content of the curriculum. The statements that make up the assessment framework can then feed into digital badge information, which is best shared with students.  Students should then keep up a digital portfolio of evidence to showcase and reflect on their learning.  These digital portfolios need to be easily accessible by teachers, so that accurate assessments of students’ knowledge, skills and understanding is made possible.

References:

Woodward, H. (2000). Portfolios: Narratives for learning. Journal of In-Service Education Vol 26 No 2 p. 329 -347.