Sunday, February 12, 2012

Enamored with PBL, Alternative Assessment, and Voki.com

Yes, I'm absolutely in love with PBL, alternative assessment and Voki.com. I'm thrilled to implement everything I learned in Week 6.
First of all, I strongly believe in alternative assessment to make our students active participants in learning and evaluation. Students used to be and still are evaluated by teachers or even school standard tests. But by implementing alternative assessment, students can evaluate each other in a same level, friendly environment different from the teacher-student evaluation.
Second of all, PBL (Project Based Learning) also enhances our students to be active participants of their learning by choosing topics that are interesting or relevant to them. I never knew that PBL can be evaluated in a systematic way with rubrics and alternative assessment.
And last but not least Voki.com, since the very beginning I realize voki.com potential. I tried it myself and I had so much fun, so I figure my students will have so much fun creating their own voki avatars. My whole project is based in this simple tool that just lets me tackle some of the issues I have with my class. As I said before the tool itself is not really important but the learning objective. Here with voki.com I can address some of the issues I face with my students.
I'm really excited to implement this tool and to evaluate the outcomes and most importantly that my students enjoy the whole process while learning or reaching some objectives.

3 comments:

wesonga said...

Hi,
The week has been educative.A happy because what we learnt this week really insisted on making our lessons students centred.I think students learn best if they relate to their own experiences that is why Am for PBL.They won't get bored!self evaluation should be inculcated in students in class.It is essential for learners to know where they made mistakes and peer correction is healthy.Nice week.

Melissa Ramos Vaesken said...

Dear Nando,
I am curious about Voki.com , what do you want to do with it in class?

And regards PBL, I agree with you. It is so good the way that helps you plan every step and even pushes you as a teacher to periodically assess the progress of their work. Have you had a look at Buck Institute for Education? There are good tips to start up and even class samples!

Regards,

Melissa

Fernando Beconi PLN said...

Hi Melissa,
I'll just tell my students to create a voki avatar about themselves. You know basic stuff such as nationality, age, likes, and so on. But the catch is that they're not allowed to give their real names so their classmates try to guess who they are. Read the Week 5: Project Task: Describe a technology-related change to get a better description of my project.
Regards
Nando