Activity aim: To (quickly and effectively) check student competency in using a tech tool; to encourage collaboration and peer teaching
Materials needed: A checklist with items that students should be able to know how to do.
Time: 15-30 minutes (or longer!) depending on the number of items on your list.
Activity description
Let’s say that you’re teaching a new group of students how to use a new technology. There’s a pretty good chance that everyone in the class is already familiar with how to use it, because it’s a tool that is commonly used in schools. However, you can’t be sure: this is a new group of students. You don’t know what they know and what they don’t.
Teacher-fronted explanations are almost guaranteed to cause students who already know how to use a particular tool to lose focus. Students who are brand new to the tool scramble to keep up. Students are commonly unable to check their understanding if they’ve missed something and are shy about asking the teacher to slow down. Others, who are already familiar with the tool, might tune out and miss an important explanation because they assume that they already know how to do something.
Enter: the self-check list, which allows students to check their own knowledge of the features of a tool at their own pace.
Here are the steps:
- Devise a list of things that students must know how to do in order to use the tool. As you devise this list, consider whether the function is actually essential or just nice to know.
- You might divide the list into “essential” and “optional” competencies, depending on your goal. If I were teaching students about Google Docs, for example, this is what my “essential” list might contain:
Essential:
-
- Make a new Google Doc.
- Give the doc a title.
- Type text into the doc (this can be any text).
- Change the color, font style, and font size of the text.
- Put some text in bold.
- Italicize some text.
- Underline some text.
- Change the Zoom on your doc so that it is magnified at 125%.
- Copy and paste text from somewhere on the internet into the doc using the key commands.
- Give the doc headings using the headings feature so that someone using a screenreader could more easily navigate your doc.
- Make a comment on some part of your text.
- Share the doc with me. First, adjust the permissions to “View Only.”
- Add a suggestion using the “suggesting” mode.
- Change my access permissions once I send you a request.
Optional:
-
- Add an image to your text.
- Resize the image so that it fits on the page.
- Use the “wrap text” feature so that your text wraps around the image.
- Add alt text to your image so that it can be recognized and read by a screenreader
- Add a pie chart to your doc.
- Add alt text to the pie chart so that someone using a screenreader could understand its contents.
3. In class, tell students that they need to check their understanding of how to do each of the items on the list. If possible, have them actually check rather than just assuming that they know how to do something.
4. If a student doesn’t know how to do an item, they should mark it on the list.
5. After a period of time, ask students to compare lists with a partner or a small group. Is there anything on the list that they have in common? Can they teach each other anything?
6. Pairs or small groups can join with other pairs and small group. Repeat the process: is there anything that this (slightly larger) group can teach the other members that is still confusing to everyone else?
7. When a significant amount of students have worked together on teaching each other about the features, they can come to the board and note which tasks are still confusing. If students from other groups agree that those tasks are confusing, they can put a checkmark by the task to indicate that they also need instruction on it.
8. You might also encourage students to add tasks under an “I learned how to….” portion of the board, where they can note how to do tasks that weren’t on the list but that someone taught them (this often happens!)
At the end of this, the teacher can give teacher-fronted instruction, or select students to give teacher-fronted instruction, on just the items on the list on the board.