Evalulation

Trial and evaluation of web based project
For my web based project I chose to have the students undertake an Inquiry and use Web 2.0 tools to record their learning journey.

The project was conducted in my classroom of 28 Year 7 and 8 students. I had initially considered restricting the project to my higher ability students, but felt that for the project to be truly successful, it should be accessible to all students. The students worked in groups of three, with one group of four, that were student selected. The students have a range of both learning styles and abilities with the majoirity being capable of working independently, but others requiring a lot of support. In a recent survey conducted in my class about student choices, there was a clear correlation between student satisfaction and engagement based on their choice of:
 * Student Details **
 * what to learn about,
 * who to work with,
 * when to complete tasks each week,
 * where to work, and
 * how to represent their learning

In terms of using I.C.T. resources, I have been very fortunate with access to both computers and the physical classroom environment in which I teach. Prior to this year, my classroom had been a storage room, but before that is was an I.C.T. suite. Within the classroom, there are six desktop computers as well as my own computer and a student laptop provided by Assistive Technology. In addition, I have access to 10 laptops that I book for approximately 40 percent of the week.
 * Computer/Classroom Setup **

In my class, 16 students have individual timetables so on Monday of each week we review what they are doing for the week and then they decide when they will use either a desktop computer or use the laptop booking calendar to determine when they will have access to a laptop.

The students were initially hooked by the use of Glogster. I had chosen this because I knew the students would enjoy creating glogs and that the glog could provide links to the pages on our wiki where they were recording their learning. I also knew that all the students could have success in their learning using Glogster whereas they would hav struggled had it been too text based. The students also reported that they liked that they were able to choose what they were studying, although this had to relate to the schools umbrella topic of globalisation.
 * What actually happened? **

The students remained on task for the first 3-4 sessions, but were so absorbed with their glogs that it was difficult to re-direct them back to locating information and focusing on answering their essential question and sub-questions. In the end it became necessary to get the students to write their questions on a piece of paper and transfer these into the wiki because they could not resist the urge to continue with their glogs. The boys are also often distracted by Dragon Fable and Adventure Quest.

Overall, I do not believe the Inquiry was a success, but this was because I needed to have spent more time at the on-set helping the students develop their essential question and sub-questions rather than the technologies we were using. In the following weeks, the students learnt a lot about using wikis, sharing resources, managing their time and most are now experts in using Glogster.

A teacher at my school recently enlisted the help of six students from my class to be peer-tutors to teach her own class how to use Glogster and reported back that they were expert tutors and that they were able to clearly explain how to use Glogster and ask questions to start the others students thinking about what they were trying to achieve. What impact you feel the activity had on the students learning, e.g. did the use of the web improve engagement and learning outcomes, etc.
 * Student Learning and Engagement **