Planning, conducting and assessing technology lessons

The outcomes that I am looking at for my Assignment 2 lessons are NSW Visual Arts Syllabus outcomes:

4.1: uses a range of strategies to explore different art making conventions and procedures to make artworks

4.6: Selects different materials and different techniques to make art

I am using the software application Evernote to have year 8 students create a digital portfolio of their art work. The lessons that I have designed will see students complete a range of works, using different techniques and materials, based on landscapes and what they learn about Impressionism. The creation of a digital portfolio should really assist me in assessment (one of the reasons I’d like to have my students create them). It means that I can assess students from home without taking large amounts of work home with me but I think it’ll also have other benefits including tracking down who owns pieces of work (year 8 boys are notorious for not putting their names on their artworks & this can make assessment extremely tedious). Having work photographed and saved to their individual portfolios will also assist if works are lost.

I found the Assessment page of the Digital Revolution’s website (http://lrrpublic.cli.det.nsw.edu.au/lrrSecure/Sites/Web/assess_approach/) was really helpful in considering some additional ways I could have students self and peer assess these portfolios. One of the benefits of using Evernote is the ease in being able to share the portfolios with others and so it would be very easy to ‘swap’ portfolios so that students could view and assess their peers. Students will use their digital portfolio as an extension of their own Visual Diaries and so the skills of self reflection will be used when they comment on the successes and weaknesses of their works. The link to Rubistar (http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php ) was also really helpful and will make creating rubrics for classes a little simpler.