AFL

AfL stands for Assessment for Learning. Applying AfL to processes can be challenging. By developing simple technologies we can engage students in assessment that assists in their learning of these processes, for example widgets to allow students to share and highlight information with groups of users, both within classes and outside of them.

AfL is a fundamental tool in the classroom toolbox to assess the processes to create work, and the ‘end products’ themselves. While application to ‘end products’ is often intuitive, applying AfL to the processes students use is more challenging, particularly if the research and ‘creation’ process occurs outside the classroom. By adding a Traffic Light widget to a tablet, smartphone or browser (via either bookmark toolbars or URL extensions), devices could easily replace existing paper based AfL tools.

Sophisticated uses would include the ability to ‘markup’ pages using the ‘red’ ‘amber’ ‘green’ system. At a low level, this could be marking the whole page – for example, if a student thought a page was useful and felt they’d understood it, they could mark it ‘green’, if they thought it looked useful but struggled to understand they would mark it ‘red’. This could be done for pre-set pages or for those used in research projects.

Within school this could be coordinated to send data to a ‘front of class’ client, for work outside school this could be co-ordinated to work in a similar way. This provides a means to share bookmarks, with a grading for understanding.

At a higher level of use, individual sections of pages could be highlighted using the colours. Individually this provides a clear map of understanding; these could be combined on a client to provide a ‘weighted’ colour such that those parts more students found difficult are marked a darker red. Using the information collected, students could be matched in groups of mixed or similar understanding levels to work together. Addons could provide access to commonly used aids such as dictionary and thesaurus tools.

Simon Knight is a PHD student studying Education at Cambridge who previously taught at secondary and sixth form level and who has extensive school ICT experience. Simon has published an article on AfL for differentiation in a practitioner targeted peer review journal, and has published in psychology journals & magazines. Simon’s current research builds on his Philosophy of Education MA thesis, which explored types of knowledge (skill v. ‘propositional’) utilised when we use things like search engines.

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