Amala's Written Reflection 2

Face-to-face assessments are often liked and preferred by teachers when they are supposed to grade their students. Thus these assessments that students are supposed to sit for are almost often in the form of a traditional paper set question in which students are required to submit their hand-written work. However, after reading the readings on alternative assessments, I realized the importance of the need for teachers to venture other options of assessing students, such as Wiki, as recommended by Tharp's Wiki Assessment (2010).

In my opinion, I think that using the platform that students are most comfortable with in the recent days is useful in assessing them. In this case, students nowadays are very much seen to be active in online platforms such as Facebook. As such, using an online platform to give students an assessment might be useful in engaging them as well. 'Wiki' is an example given by Tharp in the article. It might be arguable as to how effective it is in terms of being a proper assessment for students. After reading Tharp's article, I strongly believe that using Wiki as another platform for students to contribute their group projects encourages them to work more efficiently because 'communicating online' has become something common for students thus working on their project online saves the time and distance among them. Also, as mentioned by Tharp, it is definitely a venture into different 'collaborative pedagogies.' Working as a group cooperatively is a value that is essential among students nowadays. So, breaking away from the traditional group work that takes places in a classroom and conducting a group work using an online platform is a different form of assessment for students. The advantage to that is students are able to view their classmates' posts on Wiki as well and they are able to learn from their classmates' contributions on Wiki. Posting their work online that might be viewable to others gives them a sense of ownership to their own work and when this is the case, students will put in more effort and take pride in their work whether it is a group work or an individual work. Again, I believe that using an online platform such as Wiki or even other online learning platforms could increase students' motivation to do their work conscientiously and in an engaging form of assessment as well.

Having students to follow a rigid structure for an assessment puts them down at times as they often think that they do not have the freedom to portray their work in their own personalized manner while following the rubrics that the teacher has created for them. However, introducing them to a new platform of assessment could bring other sets of issues like students giving harsh critiques of their classmates' work that they are able to vieq online. In this way, setting expectations among the students is an essential part of the teacher before even beginning on the online project.

Overall, I support the idea of allowing students to venture into other possible learning platforms that could be used to assess their work. At the same time, giving them a set of expectations to follow is important as well.