Written feedback via EDMODO

This is why I like Edmodo so much.
It's a free platform for educators which makes our lives so much easier.

 I'd like to share some video tutorials, a dear friend from Goiania (Brazil), Edmilson Chagas, has created to show other teachers how he's been using the site to give feedback to his students.
                                                                                 

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3 

Thanks, Edmilson, for taking the time to create these tutorials and show us in detail how we can annotate using Edmodo. This is certainly a feature I'll be using A LOT this semester.

Learning from mistakes

I've always believed students can learn a lot by noticing mistakes.
And by noticing someone's mistake, you might become more aware of your own.

My sharing pick today is EVERY DAY EDIT.




Every day Edit is an archive of short texts with 10 mistakes.

Education World: Every-Day Edits | Everyday Edits | Every Day Edits via kwout

Choose one of the months and you'll get different texts to work with.

They offer the text with mistakes and another one with the corrections.

For tips on how to use this great resource, I recommend the reading of the wonderful post by Gary Hopkins with different activities for the same material. I guess that after working with these short texts on a regular basis, you can then invite students to correct writings made by their own classmates and themselves.

Do you have any other ideas for working with ERROR CORRECTION?

AUCTION Time: feedback to mistakes

I can't recall exactly where I learned this activity from but I believe it's an interesting way of giving feedback to mistakes.

This semester I've started a project with students where each week they select a picture , write a text about it and send them both to a designated e-mail address. The texts written by students are not edited beforehand , therefore, throughout the semester I tried to address their attention to the most common mistakes using different activities. For more information about the project, read a previous post.

To play AUCTION is fairly simple. First you select sentences with no mistakes and sentences which contain the most common mistakes you want to draw attention to. You can have the list of sentences on a ppt, a word file or even a poster. Explain to students you will auction sentences and their goal is to buy as many correct sentences as they can. If they buy a correct sentence they will get their money back but if they get a wrong sentence, they will lose their money. If they don't buy any sentence, by the end of the auction, they will also lose their money. I used money from an old Monopoly game to give all my students the same amount of notes.

Then, the auction starts. As soon as a sentence is sold, the teacher writes the name of the buyer and the amount paid next to the sentence. After all sentences have been sold, the teacher collects all the money from students and starts correcting the sentences with the students' help. If a sentence is right its buyer has the right to receive the money back. Keep on going until all the sentences have been analyzed. The student with the highest amount of money WINS THE GAME. These are some pictures taken in class yesterday.