I have just been listening to my lecturer’s feedback on my
blog stage 1 again and have remembered how important it is to give and receive
feedback.
She mentioned how my fonts and formatting are all over the
place in some of my posts and it reminded me of the hours of angst I’ve had the
past couple of days copying and pasting content from Word to my blog. For
anyone listening out there...this is NOT the way to do it! If anything is
guaranteed to mess up formatting and fonts it’s doing everything on Word first
and then expecting to copy and paste all that beautifully formatted and illustrated
work, as is, to your blog. So now I’m afraid it may have happened again and I
will have to check all my posts all over again because I’ve left things too
late to ask anyone else to do it.
My lecturer also mentioned the poor quality of the very
first video I did. She’s right and I meant to fix it and post another one to
demonstrate my “learning experience” and growth before I submitted Blog Stage
1...but forgot! So anyway, I’ve done a repeat of that video as a comparison
with the old one and to showcase the “learning experience”.
I felt quite pleased to know that my annotated bibliography
provided my lecturer with a new source of material about Inquiry learning. I
have found Coffman's book very interesting and informative. I was mortified,
however to hear about the number of typos and spelling mistakes in that post and
fear it may be a problem with blog stage 2 as well as I do not have time to ask
anyone to proofread it for me.
The advice she gave about topic sentences and starting with
the idea first before mentioning the author has reminded me of all the valuable
writing advice I received during the first course I did as part of this Master’s
degree. It has also made me resolve to go over those notes again!
Apparently my lecturer enjoyed reading about the ISP. I was quite delighted to hear that, as I had
really had fun creating that post, it is one of my favourites too.
As much as I enjoy receiving feedback - part of the feedback
that I received from my lecturer was to inquire about feedback I had provided
to my peers, and what I had thought of the experience. So the rest of this post will describe what
it felt like to critique someone else’s blog.
I suggested to
Kerrie that she make more use of hyperlinks in her posts. For instance, instead
of saying “refer to figure 12”, perhaps
just turn the words “figure 12” into a link to that spot. I suggested it as I think it often makes text
easier to follow. I picked up a couple of typo’s and sentence structure “glitches”
as well. I find that it’s very hard to pick up places where I have not
expressed myself very clearly and I am grateful for someone else’s “fresh eyes”
to pick up any logic errors I may have made.
It was good to read her blog and see that she had had
similar dilemmas to mine as she was also a spectator to an ILA rather than a
creator of one. I let her know that I enjoyed her screenshots of students’
comments to help the ILA “come to life”.
I agreed with her on many of her observations about student
learning and wrote,
Good points about
intervention and massive amounts of explanation being required at most points
of the ILA. I think that often we, as teachers, and as adults tend to take for
granted that students understand a lot of things that they don’t really
understand. For instance, I was quite surprised that the students I was
observing really didn’t understand the concept or meaning of primary data and
secondary data (Year 9), even though it was explained (in writing) within the
ILA documentation. I think we often underestimate students’ need for concrete,
hands-on experiences before verbal or written explanations.
Giving and receiving feedback is very powerful as it forces
one to think more closely about one’s own efforts, thus increasing metacognitive abilities.
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