My Space and My Place

How another lockdown period may impact the learners in your focus group?

How might your intervention look different if you continue through this period?

• Do any of your intervention plans work via distance learning?
• Is there any information about implementation of your changed practices/interventions you could collect during this time?

My target group of learners for my Inquiry 2021 will be my Year 12 NCEA Level 2 class. This group of learners were my target group from my 2020 Inquiry.

Another resource that I developed for my target group of learners during lockdown, has been to adapt the Assessment tasks from Onsite (software on workstations within the classroom) to Online (software available online).

In the week prior to lockdown, and as momentum was gaining traction on our news channels regarding the possibility of the Delta strain of Covid19 being in the community, I knew that I'd have to prepare my senior class for working online from home with their assessment.  The reason that this was so important is that the assessment that the students are working on, requires the use of industry-standard software that is located on the desktop machines in the classroom, and is not available on the chromebook type devices that students have access to at home.

In the week prior to lockdown, I aimed to prepare my students by asking them to make copies of their codes (so far) and paste these into documents that they would then have access to in their Drives.  In addition to this, I stepped the students through the process of setting up the 'alternative' website using the online application, Neocities, to accommodate their assessment requirements online.  Although the process of doing this makes sense in theory, in practice I could understand why my students would think that I was mad!  I could imagine them thinking, 'Why on earth is she making us do this?'  This is largely too because I didn't want to raise alarm or cause distress amongst my students, when everything (at that time) was business as usual ..... and then of course, the announcement was made on the 17th August, that we would move into lockdown, and here we are.

So, prior to the official lockdown announcement, a couple of the learners had set up their (Plan B) Neocities website, whilst the majority had not.

Once we entered lockdown, I recreated a website into my newly created Neocities website, of the codes that I had from the VS Code version of the same website.  VS Code being the software application that students were using onsite for their assessment.  I felt it important to model to the students that the quality of their sites would not be compromised by developing them in Neocities.  One of the students asked if they would still use VS Code once we were back in the classroom, to which I replied "yes" and that we'd just transfer the codes back to VS Code.

So, the process of adapting Assessment tasks from Onsite to Online (in terms of using an online alternative software) looks as follows:

1. I recreated a website in Neocities of the VS Code version of the same website to model this to my learners - link of this model website is included in the Assessment Workspace
2. I set up a presentation slide deck into our Assessment Workspace, to step students through the process of setting up their Neocities site, which differs to setting up their website using VS Code - link of this presentation slidedeck is included in the Assessment Workspace
3. I demonstrated the setup process in a Google Meet, and recorded the Meet as a rewindable resource for students who were not in the Meet - link of this Google Meet is included in the Assessment Workspace

In addition, the Evidence Gathering Templates for DGT that includes the Checklists, used in conjunction with Neocities resources, provide a structured guide on how students can progress through the tasks for their NCEA Level 2 Web Development assessment.

How another lockdown period may impact the learners in your focus group?

How might your intervention look different if you continue through this period?

• Do any of your intervention plans work via distance learning?
• Is there any information about implementation of your changed practices/interventions you could collect during this time?

My target group of learners for my Inquiry 2021 will be my Year 12 NCEA Level 2 class. This group of learners were my target group from my 2020 Inquiry.

Another resource that I developed for my target group of learners during lockdown, is Checklists within their Evidence Gathering Templates for NCEA Assessments.  Well it wasn't so much of a resource that I developed, but a resource that I made significant changes and adjustments to, in order for students to keep a track as to where they are up to in their assessment, and the criteria that they have created evidence for so far.

The following are the different variations of the Evidence Gathering Template, from the original template, through to the NEW and adapted templates for the various purposes.

Evidence Gathering Template [blank example] - Document to link evidence that aligns with standard criteria eg. Evidence could include Google docs, Screenshots, Screen Recordings etc - evidence gathering.  The idea behind the Evidence Gathering Template, is to include the heading or title of the evidence that I expect students to link into the EGT that directly relates to assessment criteria.  This is so that students can make the link between the assessment criteria and the work that they've completed, and of course, to have the evidence for the assessment linked into a central location for marking, and moderation.

NEW  Checklists within the EGT [student example] enables student to tick off tasks relating to standard criteria - student centred checklist.  The idea behind the Checklists within the EGT, is that students remain up to date with the work that they have completed so far, and work that is still be completed.  I have included tasks related to 'learning for learning' as well as tasks related to 'learning for assessment' in the checklist.  The reason is because sometimes my learners become confused if I only include the tasks associated with evidence for assessment, that slips over vital parts of the learning process.  Including the tasks related to 'learning for learning' enables the students to stay engaged with the project, according to a sequence or flowchart of tasks to complete from the beginning of the project, until the end of the project.

NEW  Moderation EGT [blank example] - Evidence of student work for moderation - moderation focussed.  The idea behind the Moderation EGT, is to remove any tasks that students have completed that don't directly relate to the assessment criteria, thus, only leaving the statements and evidence associated with assessment criteria in the template for moderators to cross check.