Frančiška Hvalc, Osnovna šola Planina pri Sevnici, Planina pri Sevnici
While teaching Design and Technology, I wanted to achieve that pupils become more responsible for their work and also for the results of their work. In fact, I put learning into the hands of students. This was possible with the help of formative assessment. Except the goal to become responsible for their own work, I wanted to strengthen communication skills, researching, critical thinking and working with sources. At the same time, pupils developed their ICT skills, which are also of great importance for their education and employment in the future. In the context of formative assessment, I carried out lessons at two schools as a part of topics Firmness of Paper and Wood Materials in class 6 (a software tool Mahara) and Metals and Energetics in class 8 (a software tool Oblak 365). With both tools, the pupils performed all phases of formative assessment: determining prior knowledge, setting goals, finding strategies to achieve these goals, evidence collection, critical friendships (classmates, teacher), giving feedback, evaluation and self-evaluation. A lot of time was devoted to practical lessons. In this process, the pupils paid more attention to how finished products, presentation and oral presentation should look like, because we made a clear set of criteria and evaluation criteria together. Using critical friendship, they were able to argue about what is good and what is bad; they were also able to give advice for improvement. They were able to accept a critical friendship of their classmates and a teacher and improve the products (the majority of pupils). In the end they were able to evaluate their product and argue why it was evaluated in a particular way. I found out that some pupils have problems with written and oral communication. Some of their compositions were clumsy and poor. Mahara, but especially Oblak 365 served pupils as a learning environment. As a part of formative assessment I used both tools. Together with pupils, I found out that the tool Oblak 365 is more user-friendly. Pupils from class 8 worked in the project EUfolio, where they used environment of Mahara for two years. Within the framework of the project ATS2020 they used Oblak 365 for formative assessment. They found out that the work in the tool Oblak 365 is easier.
