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ICT Training for Teachers |
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| Module 5: Teaching and Assessing the Use of ICT |
You will need to work out yourself what your role will be when you are using ICT in your classroom. However, you will still need to take a leading role in the classroom. Just because you are integrating the use of ICT doesn't necessarily mean that your normal role in the classroom will change. When considering your role you will need to ask:
What will your role be?
How much teacher direction will there be?
What kind of questions will you ask?
How much autonomy will you be giving the pupils?
How will you deploy an EAL or Special Needs teacher or classroom assistant?
How will you brief your EAL, Special Needs teacher or classroom assistant?
Will you share your plans and strategies?
Whichever role you adopt, a good teacher will be constantly reading the situation and modifying, extending or changing strategies and roles in response to the needs of the class, group or individual pupil (see 'Improving Teaching', Lewisham E&CS in publications)
Planning for Assessment in ICT
Careful planning for assessment is needed in order to ensure that pupils make progress in lessons, in longer term activities and projects, during the course of each year and between Key Stages. Your school should have set procedures for planning, assessing, recording and reporting. You may need to talk to your ICT Co-ordinator to find out what the policy for assessing ICT in your school is. Assessment policies should recognise that assessment lies at the heart of the process of promoting pupils' learning, providing both feedback for teachers on pupils progress, and ideas for future planning.
Listed below are some useful resources which can be very helpful to teachers when planning for the assessment of ICT:
"Expectations in Information Technology at KS1 and KS2" (SCAA, 1997): This booklet is helpful in planning as it focuses on what most children are expected to know, understand and be able to do in IT by the end of Year 2, Year 4 and Year 6. Illustrations of pupils work and commentary on their work is particularly helpful to teachers.
"Information Technology, Exemplification of Standards, Key Stage 3", (SCAA, 1997, page 6 & 7): This outlines in simple terms what the key features of each National Curriculum level are, as well as describing why work fits better with one level than with another. Even though it is intended for KS3, it is extremely useful at KS1 and KS2.
"Ideas for integrating ICT into the primary and secondary classroom" (Lewisham, 1999): This publication shows how to plan ICT in the context of other subjects and offers descriptions of the skills, knowledge and understanding for the subject being consolidated and for ICT. These are differentiated into three groups to reflect the different abilities of pupils in a class. Each activity also has examples of pupils' work and their reflective writing, with a commentary on teachers' assessment of the pupil.
"IT Scheme of work for Key Stages 1 and 2" (DfEE, 1998) : This has materials which teachers will find helpful. The scheme identifies expectations at the end of each unit in three categories. These are:
1) most children will ...
2) some children will not have made so much progress and will ...
3) some children will have progressed further and will ...
Forms of Assessment
There are three main forms of assessment. These are:
• formative
• summative
• evaluative
Formative assessment involves:
• talking to pupils
• feeding back to pupils about their progress
• giving information to pupils about what they need to do next, and what teachers expect of them
• setting targets.
Summative assessment involves:
• summing up
• reporting to particular audiences
parents
employers
other teachers
governors
next educational phase
• National Curriculum levels
At the present time (2000) there is no legal requirement to report on National Curriculum Attainment Target Levels for ICT at Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 (unlike Key Stage 3, where teachers must produce a report and award an attainment level for each pupil at the end of year 9). However, many teachers have found it helpful to refer to these levels of attainment and to use these to record and monitor children's attainment and progress in ICT, as teachers are required to keep individual records on pupils' attainment and to report to parents every year. These records, plus samples of pupils' assessed work, will also be required as part of school Ofsted inspections.
Evaluative assessment involves:
• reflecting on lessons and units of work
• judging whether a policy is effective
• reporting to governors
Key questions to ask when assessing ICT are:
What do you want to assess?
You will probably have more confidence in some subjects in the National Curriculum than others. It's a good idea to integrate assessment into subjects with which you are more familiar. When planning your activity you will need to outline the learning intentions so that you are clear about what you want pupils to know, understand and be able to do by the end of the activity. This will ensure you are clear about what you are going to assess. For example, what subject skills, knowledge and understanding, and what ICT skills, knowledge and understanding you are going to assess? If the focus of the activity is, for example, maths, you may just want to plan to assess the maths. If the focus is ICT, you may want to assess the ICT. However, it may be a consolidation for both the subject and ICT and you may want to assess both. You will have had the opportunity to write learning intentions, categorised into three different levels, when you completed Task 8 in Module 3. You will also see many examples of other teachers' planned learning intentions for their pupils in the Lewisham Publication (1999).
How will you assess?
You may use a number of different techniques to assess pupils. These could include:
You may want to use one or more of these techniques. However, because many activities with computers involve pupils working in pairs or groups, it is often difficult to assess an individual pupil's contribution to the activity. To aid teachers' assessment, pupils can be asked to evaluate their own contribution to the work. Providing pupils with evaluative questions to prompt them to reflect on their own learning can be helpful to both the pupils' learning and the teacher's assessment of their learning. Examples of questions are:
What was my task?
How did I do it?
What did I learn?
Did I get help?
Can I do better?
What will I do differently next time?
What will I do the same next time?
Examples of proformas to help pupils reflect on their work, called "Computer Diaries" can be found in the appendix to the Lewisham publication (1999).
How will you collect evidence?
Portfolios of pupils' assessed work with teacher commentaries are helpful. These should show the range of work provided for the pupils and the levels of attainment achieved by pupils of different abilities (including children with special educational needs). These can act as a reference document for the standards agreed within the school and are particularly helpful for new teachers coming to the school. They are also helpful to Ofsted inspectors in seeing the full range of the work done by pupils over a longer time period.
How will you record achievement?
Recording sheets attached to individual pieces of work are helpful to record attainment and monitor progression over time. Examples of individual work sampling proformas are printed in the Lewisham publication (1999). These help teachers to record:
1) Details of the pupil;
2) Brief details of the ICT activity;
3) The context in which the pupil worked - individually, in pairs or groups;
4) The level of support given to the pupil;
5) A summative level description.
Whole class summary sheets are also printed in the publication and teachers may find these helpful for recording the work of a whole class. This information will help in writing annual reports to parents on each child's progress.
Once pupils have completed the activity you will need to collect together:
1) printouts of pupils' work;
2) notes pupils made and their reflective write-ups;
3) notes you made on discussions you had with pupils or observations you made.
Pupils' reflections on their work, plus their printouts alongside teacher records of observations and discussions, should provide enough evidence for making a judgement about pupils' attainment. If you are assessing pupils' work against a National Curriculum Attainment Target level you will find the examples in the SCAA publication and the Lewisham publication, identified at the beginning of this module, helpful.
The key questions you need to ask yourself are:
Pupil/Teacher Discussion
Who was contributing to discussions?Was the discussion focused on the work?
Were pupils talking confidently?Teacher Observation
What did you observe?
Were all pupils contributing equally to the task?
How will you know?
What will you do if they weren't contributing equally?
Were pupils on task?
Were pupils with special educational needs making progress?
Peer/Self AssessmentDid all pupils complete their reflective writing?
Did the pupils' reflections indicate they had learned what you expected them to learn?
Task 11
Task 12