Providing an audience for learners
Creating ways to share student work to increase pride
The background
I believe people of all ages want to share what they are doing, to gain feedback and to gain a sense of pride in what they have done. This is how students starting school at four have a huge desire to be at school and bring home all that they do to share with home, I do not believe that this ever goes away, but do we as teachers think it matters less?
Here I will map out the WHY, the HOW and the desired impact of giving students an audience for their work.
For more information see @gavinsmart on twitter or his site www.smarterlearning.com
WHY?
Inspire learning
Students, when given an audience will see the work that they are doing in a different way. They should take more pride in their work and therefore think more about the process and not just the end result. By giving them an audience of more than one (teacher) they know that the work has more meaning. By sharing it with home, relatives and friends, they can be proud of their achievements and see the purpose of achieving.
HOW?
The change
So this is the harder bit. How do we as teachers create audience for students work, without creating more work for us. It is actually fairly simple.
Through the use of technology, you have access to a vast range of programmes that can send work out to the wider audience.
Below are just a few ways to share info to a wider audience.
Blogging
Probably the easiest ways is to set up a class blog. Once created, you just need to keep it updated with student work. Then share the blog address with the parents. They can log in and see the progress being made by students throughout the year. And if you are not confident in doing this? There is a great role to be made for student leadership in the classroom. Give out responsibility every week or term for someone to blog about the learning taking place. (literacy in lessons). The blog will simply have pictures of student work and an overview of what they are learning.
Not as easy to share work in the sense that the parents will need to have twitter but the same concept applies. Create a twitter account and tweet about the learning, add in pictures of student work. This will take no time to do but sends the message out about the work being done. For example, in Art take a picture of a piece of work with a tweet saying what the work is about. That piece of work may well then get seen by hundreds of people. What a great way of sharing work and showing students that it could be seen worldwide.
YouTube
For practical subjects this may be another good way to show student work. By filming student work and sharing the URL created, parents can see what is being done. This could be final performance or a student explaining what they have been doing. By making the video unlisted it can only be seen by those you share the link with.
Impact
Why do it?
So what is the point of this? Well when students are working, the majority of the time they may feel it is just a case of getting it done. Very little pride comes out of just getting things done. By providing an audience it gives a focus on getting it done well. That the work on show will be judged so make it the very best. In english it gives more eyes looking at punctuation, spelling and grammar (no doubt I have ironically got some of that wrong) Having an audience will provide opportunity for feedback from more people and feedback is what ultimately helps improve things.
It also documents what is going on and will show students the progress they are making.
The other thing is engaging parents in the students work. Beyond the parents evening, where the parents may not be able to make it. you can build a dialogue of work that the parents can see, when you do speak to parents you can discuss the progress of work that has been shared.