Present: SL, EA, NM, HF

Apologies KM, NW, LC, BB, SM, JB

This week’s focus: Marking Tips

We decided to discuss useful tips when marking work as a result of the last meeting where SM showed us some stickers that she had made herself with common comments she would use when marking.

Useful ideas from this session:

1. Write a question, rather than telling them what’s wrong. EG. Instead of Becareful with verb endings! (in TL or otherwise), What’s the ending of an er verb in the the 3rd person? This can then be followed up and checked in later lessons.
2. Using a bank of marking comments across the department, or using set phrases that are cognates, EG It is necessary to…You must…Careful with..etc.
3. Another school’s marking policy involves writing three points at the end of every piece of work. The first comment is written next to a tick in a circle and has positive comments next to it, then the is an exclamation mark inside a triangle has comments on what the pupil must be careful with, and finally, an arrow pointing upwards with ways of improving next to it. They also include an NC level on the work.
4. Two stars and a wish – the teacher must write two positive comments (two stars) and one thing that they must improve upon (the wish). No grade is given, as pupils will always focus on the grade, rather than the comments, which, from a teacher’s point of view, can be rather annoying as it can take such a long time to write comments for every pupil’s work.
5. Merits – last meeting the use of merits was discussed, and the fact that the merit stickers from www.mystickers.co.uk can be worth points. Pupils collect the merits, input the code from the sticker into their account on the website to get points, and can win prizes the more points they have.
6. Frog Merits (and Fish Merits). HF’s school have been giving out Frog Merits in French, for good use of TL. These get labelled with the pupil’s details, and put into a raffle that is drawn regularly. Fish merits have now been introduced to German (H Fish!).

We also discussed the English system of not only NC levels, but GCSE level grades, and A Level grades. It was noted that in Spain the system 1-10 is used (with 10 being the highest) and in Germany 1-6 (or 1-15 at higher levels) is used.

AOB/Golden Nuggets

Organising & Filing – How do we all file and organise ourselves? We all have multiple places where we can store electronic files (USB stick, My Documents at School, School shared area, home computer) and it can get a bit complicated. We all use different methods, and are trying to find one that suits us the most. Some teachers also have paper copies of everything and keep things both at home and at school, although with most of us moving away from OHTs the majority of things used are electronic.

Accent Codes – It was noted that in PowerPoint one can’t use the ‘control’ shortcut keys for accents. Other ways of putting accents that work in PowerPointwould be

• to use the ALT codes
• changing the keyboard to another language (if you know the layout of the foreign keyboard). For more information and handy hints click here or here.
• using a small program that always has the main accents that you use for your language onscreen (F Keys was mentioned or a quick Google search brought up Mophy Software - a free program).

OHT vs Whiteboards – The question: Do any of us still use acetates in class? The answer: Yes, ocassionally, especially just to do something different, to recycle good resources, or just to allow the pupils to have more control in front of the class. It was acknowledged that we all really liked to get the pupils to write on to acetate, and display their work via the OHP.

Mentioned the importance of blogging ( ) to gain ideas. Isabell Jones, via her blog, has recently set herself an IWB Challenge, where she has to use the IWB in a new way once a week.

Finally GoogleMyWay was mentioned as a way to engage your class. It allows you to customise the word that appears at the top of the page. Here’s one I made earlier.

NEXT MEETING

The next meeting is undecided at this moment, however we need to say goodbye to NM who moves to Spain this summer for work, so we are considering a more social evening in Preston. I will update with details when they are known.

SLL