Activity 8 «Mental notes about students»
The teacher makes mental notes about students after class. These notes are based on observations of how the students work, who they like to work with, what their specialities are, personality traits, and interests.
Learning outcomes
This is not visible to students, so there is no direct learning outcome for them.
Motivation
Teacher
- Teachers form mental notes about their students all the time, but recording them allows them to reflect on them, see student progress, and to remember them more fully.
- A substitute teacher can get invaluable help from the mental notes of the class teacher.
Student
- none
Reasons for using technology
The TeamUp tool allows the teacher to record mental notes easily, and can also utilise those notes to generate team configurations that are heterogenous and avoid problematic teams (like the class bully and his victim being in the same team). The mental notes are represented by icons that the teacher can give personal meaning to.
Guidelines
Required time
A few minutes after class or once a week to record mental notes.
Preparation
Decide where to store your mental notes. Consider if you want your students to see them or not.
- TeamUp: Can store mental notes using badges that the teacher assigns meaning to (e.g. the “bumblebee” badge can mean that a student is fussy, easily distracted, hard working, likes to move about, etc.)
- otherwise: Use any technology to store notes.
After class, review your notes and update them.
- TeamUp: Go through each student in edit mode and add or remove any badges on an intuitive basis.
- otherwise: Update your notes.
Assessment
You may use your mental notes as a guide in assessing student performance and improvement.
Technology support
TeamUp
Technical details
Technology
- Required: none
- Preferred: TeamUP
- Nice to have: none
Resources
- Locations: none
- Events: none
- People: none
Tags
Mental notes, teacher notes
http://itec.eun.org/web/guest/scenarios
English
