Evaluation is of great importance within teaching career.
Nevertheless, not only gives this teachers´ headache but we have also dedicated
very short time in our training period during Teaching Grade. Rubrics can
assist us on defining what we need or want to evaluate from our students
learning process. Dedicating time to define our rubric previous to any
evaluation process would save us time and worries later. Having a well-defined
rubric provides security not only to the
teacher as they know where their focus is on, but also to students, as they
know what their examiner is going to pay attention to.
Rubrics are useful to define how competences, performances are evaluated.
These rubrics can also be used in marking an exam, which although it is said
that exams only evaluate knowledge, through a rubric the correction criteria
can be specified.
Rubric provides teachers with accountability when having to explain
a particular grade.
Personally, I cannot recall whether this type of tool were available
to us as student in my primary school. I do remember having a lot of auto
evaluations or co-evaluations but I do not remember if we were provided with
this type of tool. Although, in my opinion, what is more surprising is that
even though, we have been studying a Teaching Grade, we are not fully familiar
with this type of tool, and we have rarely had it available for our evaluation
from our teacher beforehand. Looking backwards, I believe it would have been of
a great use both to know how we are going to be evaluated but also, as to learn
from the tools our teachers have being using. http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php
Interactive Whiteboards seem to be
an innovative tool to use in the English classroom. I have had the opportunity of
using it and I have no doubt that what I have got to know is only a reduced
part of it, so, the options which provides are endless. Once more, I believe that Interactive Whiteboards
have been introduced following the Government´s agenda rather than the request
from teachers. Many are the schools that have been able to fill all or some of
their classes with these whiteboards, but their teachers have not received a
full training to use them. From my experience in schools, Interactive Whiteboards
are underused and only some teachers use it to screen the text book used in
class, under the believe that students pay better attention to the screened
book comparing to the print book children have on their desks.
I believe Storyjumper is
one of the easiest tools from children to use in order to create their own stories.
This offers the opportunity of creating stories, which children can build with
selected pictures and characters. It seems that Storyjumper has been designed to
create stories; however, I would dare to say that this could also be used as a
presentation tool for any topic work within the class.
