Timothy Herzog, chemistry professor at Weber State University, discusses how he uses PhET simulations in his class and gives teaching examples that are relevant across grade levels and disciplines.
Peer review is an integral part of many courses, and students learn a lot from evaluating the work of their peers. Unfortunately, setting up a peer review system has its challenges: It’s not easy to teach students how to give each other effective feedback. It’s also difficult to hide student identities, making truly unbiased feedback hard to accomplish. And if you have a large number of students, keeping track of who has given feedback to whom can be frustrating and time-consuming.
Peergrade takes care of a few of these issues. Originally created for use at universities, it’s a platform where students can evaluate each other’s work anonymously. After the teacher creates an assignment and a rubric, students submit their work. Next, Peergrade randomly distributes the assignments to different classmates for evaluation. Students give feedback to their classmates using the rubric set up by the teacher; they can add written comments as well as selecting options from the rubric. Finally, students can view the feedback given to them; they can rate the comments as helpful or not, and even flag problematic comments.
Wiki's are an amazing tool, both for a teacher personally and for his or her class. The ability to share information and grow information with a wiki is truly wonderful. And since a wiki can be sorted by page topic -- rather than by date (as with a blog) -- it makes it a very powerful tool to use.
