Thursday, March 04, 2010

Using Jing to Assess Online Student Writing

Been experimenting for the last couple days with Jing.

And among several uses I've found for it, by far the most important for me has been as a means of giving in-depth feedback to students on their blogs and in their writings.

I'm not the only teacher who has been frustrated by the limitation -- especially on blogs -- for marking up and commenting on student work. And so I've been looking for an alternative.

I wanted something that was more flexible, more personable, and more similar to a one-to-one conference with a student.

Jing supplies all of that.

Here are two examples of my use of Jing to assist in the assessment of student writing. The students are 9th graders in History class. You'll see that I'm pushing them to think about the sources they use and to think about how they structure an argument.

Example One

Example Two

I know many of you have used Jing for all sorts of purposes and would love it if you would share your most interesting ideas.

In a way, I'm embarrassed that it took me so long to realize that the solution to my problem was sitting there right in front of me for so long. But, such is learning.

7 comments:

  1. Thanks for posting some examples of how you provided feedback using Jing. Question: what is the time differential b/t using this format versus how much time you would spend on a paper essay (I know its probably been sometime since you've engaged in that type of feedback.) or in a f2f meeting w/ a student?

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  2. This is pretty similar to how I gave feedback to students after a video project. I did a "commentary" on their videos pointing out things they did well & things that could use improvement simply by narrating over top of their video using iMovie. They generally seemed to enjoy the format.

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  3. @DrGarcia,

    Not sure about time differential, but quality differential is big. On these posts, I was most interested in sources and the structures of arguments; this is stuff I personally have always had trouble explaining in writing. With Jing, as demonstrated in the examples, I can actually show them in 'real-time' what I'm talking about when I'm talking about a 'bad' web resource vs. a good one.

    @Ben
    Very cool. The teacher I share a room with (@schickbob) teaches TV Production and is using Jing for the same purpose.

    What I'm planning is that 'Jing Comments' will be my primary form of marking up student work.

    - Shelly

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  4. Just getting acquainted with Jing myself, but it seem like it could be used to give assignments in a pinch. On days when we can't be in school, Jing provides a way to get detailed instructions directly to your students, taking the pressure off your sub.

    - @schickbob

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  5. Thanks for the great examples. I recently created a three part tutorial on using iMovie for a digital book talk project I created. I can embed it in an online Moodle class as well so students have an easy step-by-step guide. One question: how do I manage to shrink the original screencast to fit on my blog like you did?

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  6. I like how you can give such detailed feedback to your students, who BTW, are doing a great job in their papers to do them online in the blog format like this. It sounds like it took a while for each. I'm also glad to see you dealing at a high thinking level for their work. How much time are you devoting to each paper when you use this method?

    I also wonder for the visual learner with weak auditory learning skills if they need a capsulized synopsis of points that they might get in writing. Of course, few teachers would provide the detailed feedback you ever did in writing, so it is still a huge advantage.

    In any event, they get a very rich feedback set here with this method. Great idea!

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  7. I use it with a rubric on screen to show how I've graded papers. Students are MUCH more likely to listen to comments when they can listen over and over.

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