I happen to love my vice principal’s blog, and her recent post on The Selfie Era of Assessment really intrigued me. I’m a huge advocate of taking photographs and videos in the classroom to document learning, but after reading Kristi‘s blog post, I found myself on Friday being even more aware of the captions that I added to each of my photographs. If I couldn’t capture the learning in these captions, I was trying to record videos and podcasts to do so. I really wanted to not just document that the students were working and learning, but what they were doing and why they were doing it. I wanted to make the learning itself more visible, and I wanted to incorporate “my voice” and the “student voice” into the comments on each tweet. Somehow just thinking about the term, “Selfie Assessment,” gives me a better understanding of how to move from a random photograph to a photograph with meaning.
After coming home last night and being so excited about “Selfie Assessments,” I couldn’t help but Google the “Selfie Song” to find out how it really sounds. It was at that point, that I sent Kristi this tweet:
Kristi quickly responded with a tweet of her own:
Well my students love a good challenge, and we are about to start poetry, so what a perfect time to write a song! There’s such a great connection between poetry and music! The problem though is that the Selfie Song — assuming that I found the right one — is not appropriate to share with a class of Grade 5 students. So at this point, instead of challenging my students, I challenged myself. Here are the links to my words — just a single verse was enough for me — along with an audio recording for anyone that wishes to hear my questionable singing.
Time To Take A Selfie
While this activity was just done for fun, and I do apologize for my singing skills — or lack thereof — I must say that it was nice to sit back and think about what I would include in a Selfie Assessment Song. I can totally see a music video of this with photographs and tweets of student learning: highlighting the words of the song with real classroom evidence. I also think that it’s important to consider how our classroom observations will impact on future plans, and that’s what I wanted to capture in my Selfie Assessment Song. What would you capture in yours? Maybe we can all explore our musical sides with reflections on assessment.
Aviva