The ability to evaluate allows us to improve upon our work. It’s a valuable skill, one that will be useful in any career.
When evaluating a project, encourage learners to look at everything - not only the content and layout, but also the digital skills used. Improving those skills will improve the quality of the content and layout.
You’ll be able to carry out more constructive evaluations by asking the right questions.
Did they need digital tools to create this project? What did they add? Could it have been done as well without them? And could it have been done better with other tools?
A good way of helping learners to define the success criteria for their own projects is to ask them to critically evaluate a range of examples of past presentations.
Evaluation at this level involves justifying the decision to choose one form of digital communication over another.
Learners need to analyse the technical and stylistic components, as well as the quality of the information communicated. They should consider how the tools available have helped them achieve their aims.
Digital tools and techniques can also be used to conduct better evaluations. Learners can use available software to share their work, and ‘comment’ or ‘dialogue’ boxes to give peer-to-peer feedback.
When doing final assessments, take a holistic view of what has been achieved.
Evaluate both the content and the digital competencies shown. Give learners credit for the degree to which they have used digital resources to achieve their goals.
In this short film for teachers Rhys ap William talks about the importance of evaluation and how students can improve their work if they learn to do it effectively.
Teacher notes
Students could examine all aspects of some past presentations and school work – the content, layout and digital tools used. They should ask themselves how they could be improved and were the digital tools that they chose the best ones for the job?
As a group, they could also constructively evaluate shared work using comment boxes.
Teachers should give students credit for all digital tools that have been used effectively.
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