The change I want to make of the instructional activities is to assign a table cloth challenge for my students as a pre-assessment and pre-assignment.
In the pre-assessment, students will
- record and showcase their tablecloth trick in a video
- share their experiences, including failures and success during their practices
- share the strategies that help them succeed
- upload the video to Flipgrid and edit a video to sell their strategies
In the class, students will
- Show the whole class their videos and evaluate each other's strategies
- Listen and learn the scientific vocabularies and theories from teacher's demonstration
- Reflect on their strategies using Newton's 1st Law of Motion and practice using the academic language to explain their strategies
After the class, as a formal assessment, students will
- Refine or modify their strategies of tablecloth trick using Newton's 1st Law of motion
- Create a social media post to sell their strategies to their classmates using academic language
ICT skills: record and edit videos
Students will learn how to use Flipgrid to edit a video clip and learn how to use their devices, such as Chromebook or phone, to videotape a clip.
NML Skills: Content Creators and Global Collaborators
Rather than passively listen to the teacher, the students become the content creator of the class and enact collaborative problem-solving skills (Jenkins, 2006). The videos they created may be further broadcast outside the school community. Then they will connect their learnings with their families and even become a global collaborator that makes contributions to the broader scientific community through social media (Maloy et al, 2016). The digital communication system offered by social media will activate students' synergies to become participators of the collaborative contributing society.
New Media Literacy: Appropriation
When students begin to think and discuss about what to videotape and how to present their ideas, the students learn to adjust their languages and selections of materials to meet their audience's needs. In this process, students enact "Appropriation" defined by Jenkins (2006) that students are able to analyze the audience, choose the appropriate tones and elaborate their ideas in audience-friendly ways. In the pre-assessment, the audience is general public. Therefore, students will use daily languages to explain their strategies and concepts with limited usage of academic vocabularies. In the final assessment, the audience are members in the classroom. Then the students will use a mix of academic language and conversational language. They will employ scientific discourse to rationalize their tablecloth trick strategies, while they will finalize their strategies in a social media post, which usually involves more casual languge usage.
Formative Assessment: Social Media Post
- Assessing Content Learning: students will be assessed by the quality of writings(or speaking if it is a short video). Students are expected to make solid connections between Newton's Laws and their strategies using appropriate academic vocabularies. Students need to employ CER model(Claim, Evidence and Reasoning) in their presentation.
- Assessing NML/ICT tools: students will be assessed by the choice of clips, language or presentation methods in the social media post. Depending on the platform, students are expected to code-switch between general public friendly language and academic language. They are also expected to respond to the replies, retweets or questions on the social media.
Informal Assessments
- Pre-assessment video clips: I will assess students' prior knowledge and scientific practices of trial and errors by analyzing the video clips they submit.
- In-class discussion: I will monitor the in-class discussions of the strategies and student questions of each other's presentations. Depending on their discussions and questions, I will decide how to support the students to derive the meanings of Newton's Laws of motion from their current understandings.
- NML/ICT skills assessments: Students will be evaluated by the submission of video clips and I will provide feedbacks. Then, students will modify their videos and presentations based on the teacher's and their peers' feedback. Eventually, the students will be evaluated in a cyclic process.
References
Kimmons, R., Graham, C. R., & West, R. E. (2020). The PICRAT model for technology integration in teacher preparation. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 20(1), 176-198.
Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A. J., and Weigel, M. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Chicago, IL: MacArthur Foundation.
Maloy, Verock, Edwards, & Wolf. (2016). Chapter 8: Collaborating and Communicating with Social Media, pp. 184-211. In Transforming Learning with New Technologies, 3/e. NY: Pearson.
Credits:
Created with images by Chris Lawton - "untitled image" • Patrick Perkins - "From a naming brainstorm at a talk" • Marcos Luiz Photograph - "Worship" • Kushagra Kevat - "Bokeh…" • Hello I'm Nik 🎞 - "The Tik Tok app 📹" • Nikita Kachanovsky - "On my eames"