Friday, October 10, 2008
Case study of Personalisation by Pieces at Radstock School
Radstock Primary School in Wokingham, Berkshire has been using PbyP to support greater learner engagement in Year Six.
The children at Radstock Primary School are now very used to explaining the ways they like to use new innovations and ideas in ICT in their learning: they have won awards from Becta and their local authority for this and written for and presented at conferences. Most recently the Radstock learners won the Becta "Y" Factor competition for innovative and creative use of ICT after competing in finals held at this year's Handheld Learning Conference.
Our case study of PbyP at Radstock looks at why and how Philip Griffin, Learning Platform Lead and ICT Coordinator used PbyP to develop learner responsibility and peer assessment in the school. The school regularly uses secure forums to explore ideas and topics with children and kindly hosted a discussion about PbyP with the children to help us include their perspective in the case study.
Who?
Philip Griffin, Assessment for Learning Coordinator, Learning Platform Lead and ICT Coordinator at Radstock introduced PbyP to “further encourage children’s self assessment and knowing how and why they learnt”. The school has an impressive track record in terms of engaging with new technology, establishing a culture of peer assessment and allowing children to take greater responsibility. Philip felt that PbyP “was just a natural extension of this”.
How?
60 Year 6 students had one ¾ hour session in the ICT suite each week to set themselves skills targets from the PbyP site and upload evidence from their week in school.
Jake used his love of football club to create a fact file made up of information and pictures from different websites on his home computer then uploaded it into PbyP at home as evidence of his skill at ‘Combining Sources’ level four.
John progressed his ‘Creativity’ skill to level 4 using an excellent animated story of a monster. The year nine student who marked it in a school over 100 miles away loved it and gave him very positive feedback. John is now working on level 5 and is, himself a four star assessor of other children’s work in PbyP.
Success.
The decision by Staff to leave it “completely up to the children to choose their targets in PbyP” was very popular with the children. As Oliver says “the point is for us to produce work that we have made by ourselves and reckon if it is good enough by ourselves”. The ability to use work from any subject in any media was also very popular as Iona says “The best thing about PbyP is that you get to express your feelings through your work throughout the school Curriculum, from maths ,to English to of course ICT”.
At the end of the year every child received a printed certificate recognising their achievements in PbyP both as a learner and a peer assessor.
The children said:
"The good thing about PbyP is that you can work on a piece of work whenever you feel like it, as you can use the software wherever and whenever you want (as long as you have a computer with you)."
"I like setting my targets and then fulfilling them with good pieces of work that will hopefully pass!"
"Most of the time I listen to everything we have done in class. I then try and link the targets."
Next Year.
It is clear from the children’s comments Philip and his team have provided opportunities for children to make genuine choices, express themselves and engage in peer assessment. Carla’s comment that “it is just a fun way of doing what we do in the classroom” is one of many that suggests children have become used to expecting peer assessment and online working as integral to their learning. Next year Philip hopes to involve parents more as mentors in PbyP and integrate this into the schools award winning use of their Learning Platform.