For our final assessment in grade 9, we are answering questions reflecting on our work and improvement over the year. There are six questions that I will be answering, and I will provide evidence.
4.) Give an example of the planning/development of an assignment that you’re most pleased/proud of.
I am proud of the planning that went into my inquiry project about how music affects you. I did a lot of research, and I planned experiments, cue cards, and I watched interviews online about what I was talking about. I am pleased with the amount of information that I found about the topic. I made notes about how music affects people, physically, mentally, and how it affects your mood, and how society influences your music taste. I practiced presenting my project to different people so that I could get used to speaking about the topic out loud to make it less awkward.
5.) Formative feedback is the same as summative except you get it before you finalize/submit the assignment. How did it help you improve the quality and/or level of your work to get your feedback during your work instead of after it?
I think formative feedback helped me improve my work over the year. It helped me improve the quality of my work because I could read what the teacher thinks I could improve or fix before I handed it in. If I could fix my mistakes or improve my grammar before I handed in a formal assignment, it could improve the overall level of my work and I would get a higher mark. When we were re-writing the end of The Outsiders, we would get feedback from the teacher about what we could improve or what was good about our work so far. I prefer formative feedback because it also helps me improve work in the future. Feedback after I finish an assignment is also helpful, but if I can fix my work while I am doing it, I can learn while I am doing and it will help me remember tricks in the future.
6.) Did you reach or test your potential in this ELA class? Explain with an example.
I think I didn’t quite reach my potential in this ELA class. I think I could have done better in responses to questions like the I am Sam responses. We watched a movie and then analyzed it, but I think my answers could have been more developed if I would have had more time to explain my answers in more depth, or if I knew how to explain things better. If I would have had something like formative feedback for this activity that told me how I could improve my answers, I could have maybe reached my potential in my writing and responses.
8.) Explain whether you felt sufficiently challenged in your ELA work this year. Give an example of a task project that tested the limits of your abilities.
I think I was challenged just enough this year in ELA. None of the work was too easy, but none of it was too hard either. A project that tested my abilities was writing the tone paragraph. We had to choose specific words to work into a paragraph to set the tone either positive, negative, or sarcastic. I decided to write a sarcastic paragraph to challenge my abilities. It is hard to find words that set the tone of the paragraph as sarcastic, but not sounding overly rude or negative. We wrote narrative paragraphs about teen dating, and I assumed the role of a grandparent, talking about their dating life when they were young.
9.)You developed your blog this year, adding samples of a lot of your work. In doing so, you’ve tweaked it to include a fair representation of your personality online. What skills do you think you’ve developed through using this blog? List two positives and two negatives of the blogging work you’ve done this year.
I think the primary skill I developed through blogging this year was how to write to an audience. Before I started blogging, writing to an audience was something I had never really done before. When I am writing a blog post, I know I have an audience that will see what I am writing, so I write my posts for them instead of for myself. Something good about blogging is that it is easy to find assignments and save them without having documents cluttering up your hard drive. It is a good way to hand in assignments because the teacher can just visit your blog, and see your work all digitally. Another good thing is that I developed the skill of writing to an audience. I didn’t know how to write for people before and now I know. Something I don’t like about blogging is that the way we do it, it is kind of inconsistent. I would like us to have posted something on a more regular basis, even if it was just an update. Something else I didn’t like is that we posted the same things on all of our blogs. I would have liked if we posted differnet things.