Sight Project--Assessment Day One

Even though the schedule was a bit tight, the English teacher wanted to show everyone's Photo Story in Class. Monday, the first day of watching the videos, was short because of a 2 hour delay. We didn't get through as many as she would have liked. But, we both understood that it was important for the students to have an audience for this project. Part of the incentive we had given them to do well was the idea of sharing these projects with the class.

Unfortunately, we didn't make a rubric until the project was underway. We didn't even finalize it until after watching the first round of videos.

Being that this was the first time through the project, watching the videos, and critiquing them (we both took notes for later use) helped us put together a rubric.

After watching videos in all three classes, we worked through her study hall finalizing the rubric. We re-arranged some categories, and played with point values. By the end, we had a web-like drawing with numbers all over it. We then experimented with one project. We both determined what we thought the grade should be, then graded it using the rubric, and compared.

The one thing we were both most dissapointed with was that we had told students that they did not have to use music. After viewing finished projects, though, we found that some students had long stretches of video that were just pictures of friends. It was boring. But, since we had told kids that they didn't have to have music, we didn't feel that we could make "use of music" a catagory. Instead, we settled on including it as part of flow. Most stories that lacked music had less of a flow.

And even though we reminded students of it several times, some still lost focus and made stories that seemed like they were dying, not going blind. We covered that in a catagory called focus. Most students did a decent job of remembering for most of the story that this was about sight. Some just failed to explain why some of their choices would be things they wanted to see rather than do. The worst catagory for this was family and friends. Most students had an entire section about wanting to spend time with family and friends. Very few remembered to explain that they wanted to see--to rememeber what their friends looked like, or memorize mom's face. Another common area that this came up was in reading, movies, and tv shows. I think a casual observer might have thought some of these stories were about the last days of life.

At the end of study hall, we had agreed on the final catagories and points values for our rubric. The English teacher had another class, and was a bit weary of grading projects. So, she planned to type it out and let me make copies, and we would meet up again to compare the first round of coments with the rubrics, and grade the projects.

I'm hoping to be able to put some student projects up on my student project wiki. I'm not sure how many I will be able to use, though, since most of them contain pictures of friends and family, and most have student names as part of the footage. I'll have to talk with the teacher about that. For now, though, I am posting the rubric we used. Any suggestions are welcome.