At the start of this academic year I’ve been giving the majority of the students I teach accounts (@mrbelshaw.co.uk) using Google Apps for Education. This is free of charge and, so far, seems fantastic. As a result, I’ve been thinking about what I can now do that I couldn’t do or would be difficult to do before. This, as I’ve posted about recently is the School 2.0 approach I want to be helping work towards.

Wikis are all well and good, but they’re usually public. I think Google Docs can be used as a wiki-like solution for smaller groups and are a more private solution. Last academic year, in a post entitled Coursework 2.0, I outlined how I used Google Docs with my GCSE History students for their coursework. There were teething problems but it opened up many possibilities. Because of the nature of coursework, however, we weren’t using Google Docs for inter-student collaboration.

This academic year I want to use Google Docs that are part of students’ @mrbelshaw.co.uk accounts for peer and self-assessment. There are many names for what I describe and some people may know it as a form of Assessment for Learning. Here’s what I plan to do:

1. Set students learning objective(s) and success criteria.
2. Student writes response to question/completes project/produces agreed content.
3. Student invites teacher to view document.
4. Teacher assigns students ‘critical partners’. These could be either those at a similar level or different, depending on the purpose of the activity. (I’ll mostly be going for the former)
5. Critical partner uses learning objective(s) and success criteria to evaluate and provide feedback on original author’s work.
6. Original author modifies work in light of comments by critical partner.
7. Work is submitted by original author to teacher by a given deadline.
8. Work is assessed according to learning objective(s) and success criteria by teacher and returned to original student author.

The beauty of this is its inherent flexibility. The first time I do this, I’m likely to use people within the same class – or at least within the same year. But there’s no reason why ‘critical partners’ could be in different classes, years, schools, or even continents!

Teachers can subscribe to the RSS feed for each document they have been invited to view by students. This allows them to monitor the progress being made and to ensure everything is going according to plan. One of the first ways I’m going to try this is with my Year 11 History group for past exam questions. I shall set the source-based exam questions along with the mark scheme, then go through the process outlined above.

Anyone care to join me? Any thoughts on the process? Should it be tweaked in any way? :D