Guided Inquiry Project: Using Music to Learn French- Part 3 (Sharing and Assessing)

For part 1- Provocation and Criteria,  click here.  

For part 2- Research and Writing, click here. 

For the last part of this blog-series, I will review how the students shared the information they found and how I assessed their projects.  As a bonus, I will include how I provided instant feedback by completing my assessments on an iPad, and then emailed the results to my students.  A major component of the inquiry process is the sharing and communication of the research, as well as any conclusions and further questions.  

To share the students research and work, we had a French Music Expo in our class.  The students were responsible for completing a presentation about their song, and they presented to the FSL students in our school.  

We are a dual track school, so we have French Immersion and Core French students that were happy to come and visit our expo.  I invited the other French teachers to bring their classes when they could accommodate a visit.  For sign-up, I used a Google Doc and table, and had a class sign-up for each block (so that the room would not be too crowded.)  Then throughout the day, each of my classes presented to another class.

I created a form for student visitors to complete:

Students presented and answered questions.  it was great to see the FI students and the Core students interacting in French.  My Core students were nervous about speaking with the FI classes, but they did a great job.  

Assessment- My assessment of this project was 2-fold; one mark for speaking, and one mark for writing.  The rubric the students got at the start of the project was this to guide their written component:

So this was the rubric I used when marking their written copies.  I marked them as the students finished them, the old-fashioned way with a rubric and a pen.

For the oral communication component, I marked the assignments as the expo occurred.  I took my OC rubric, I use the same ones depending on what part of the CEFR I'm focus on, and created a Google form to use as I walked around.  That was I could assess projects on my iPad.

All the components of the rubrics were typed out in the Google Form so all I had to do was check one for each focus.  In the form I added a section for the student's email so that the results would be emailed to the student as I submitted the results to my spreadsheet.

I added a script to my Google Sheet in order to have the students marks email directly to their email addresses.  You can see that my emails have been sent according to my spreadsheet.

There are many add-ons that you can use to do this.  I used Form-emailer which is not available as an add on (directly) anymore.  There are some other straight-forward mail merge programs for sheets though, and some great tutorial videos to guide you!  One great program is Autocrat- available as an add-on.  To add an add-on, click on "Add-ons" in the top menu, and you will get a screen like this:

Browse through and find which add-on will work for you.  Autocrat is the most popular with teachers, and has the most support.  Here's a great tutorial from Amy Mayer to show you how to use the Autocrat Add-on:

(If you want me to do a video on adding scripts to Google Docs, and using FormEmailer and Google sheets, let me know in the comments, and I will create a video tutorial.)  

Not only do I have a handy spreadsheet for my grades, but the feedback has been handed back promptly.  My students were able to look at my feedback on their phones.  On their end, their feedback looked like this:

Students get all my notes and their grade as a fraction, as well as a message for their next steps.  My students did appreciate getting their feedback right away.  I like that they get the feedback while their work is fresh in their minds.  

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So there it is- Our latest Inquiry project from start to finish.  I'm sure that there are parts of these posts that may be unclear- or that I have overlooked, so please feel free to ask questions in the comments!  Hopefully I was able to demystify the process of this type of learning in FSL class.  

If you are interested in seeing a shorter Inquiry activity in FSL, click here.  Want the basics? Click here.