Reflection 2

Learning that students are not just engaged based on the activities but also on the evaluation method is a take away I got after reading Comer’s “Young Adult Literature and Alternative Assessment Measures”. This indeed emphasizes the importance of choosing a suitable assessment method as it would contribute to the students’ interests and them determining the activity’s importance. As such, when she points out that the use of technology in assessment allows students to make use of the “skills they have mastered in an appropriate and useful manner”, I cannot agree more and hence would like to incorporate technology in my assessment.

Comer suggests methods such as a “Twitter Summary”, which would enable students to pick out the main points due to the short word limit. I like the idea that when a student is limited, they are “forced” to pick out the main points. Based on this, I would like to explore the possibility of having students create an online scrapbook page which allows them to put pictures, videos, or captions, but limited to a page. This idea stems from initially wanting students to have a portfolio, with scrapbooking as one of the components. Therefore, by bringing scrapbooking online, it would allow students to make use of their technological skills; giving them autonomy over what they choose to put on their page and be creative, but at the same time limiting them to only a page. A possible site to use would be www.gloster.com, which is easy to navigate and create. This can be use for chapter summaries or character analysis, where students may create a page for each chapter or each character.

However, it is also important to note that the “use of technology in assessment is constantly changing”. Hence, I must be in touch with the latest programmes in order to keep up with students and know what would keep them interested, such that I can implement it for the upcoming assessment.