a)    Initiate-Respond-Evaluate Sequence: Mostly, students are free to respond by raising their hands or voices. In some situations, students from certain groups may be selected to respond. Typically, IRE-sequences are weak in eliciting responses or checking for understanding of more introverted students. How would the IRE sequence be improved to elicit their responses too?  

b)    Reference to previous lesson/s: Use of class-created text as a point of reference. Imperfections in the class-created text does result in possible learning points for students in their own creations. Some explanations about the descriptors in the rubric, but can there be a direct application of the rubric to the class-created text as an example of use, rather than unsystematic critique of class-created text during the teaching phase?  

c)     Teacher-student interaction: Teacher-directed mostly, students as respondents, but students can also point out observations and raise questions. Student-to-student discourse are mostly task-oriented, e.g. font, content, while there are more sporadic examples of collaborative communication, e.g. what would you like to include, let’s work on this. Critical discourse is very limited, even though the lesson focuses on the higher levels of critiquing. Inviting critiques not only in the forms of statements, but teaching them to frame it as questions, will allow for even more meaningful discourse between students. Teaching slides, e.g. Task slide, can include sample questions for meaningful critique, e.g. “How can the font be changed to make it look clearer” vs “Change the font!”

d)    Teaching rhythm: Variety of phases in the teaching process, e.g. Orientation, Teacher-talk, independent work, discussion, teacher-talk phase. Note: When students are already working on their devices during the independent phase, returning to the teacher-talk phase requires “command of attention”. About 50% of the students did not or were late to give attention to the teacher during the teacher-talk phase of the checklist/success criteria part. Getting the students to shut their Chromebook covers for the teaching phase is a good classroom practice for focus.

e) Metacognition: Significant metacognitive potential in the lesson, with constructs like success criteria and the use of checklists great for developing metacognition. Students, being generally more task-oriented, may not pay significant attention during the metacognitive phase, and thus result in superficial application (“filling” the blanks) rather than examining their own thinking or product. A screen control application like Peardeck on Google Sheets may be useful to ensure that all students are focused during the metacognitive phase as there is no genuine need to refer to their individual work to perform the metacognitive aspects [Use as a summative review poll]. Also, do not allow “NIL” responses if metacognition is important (okay if only task is important.).

• being able to write an informative text and create a poster to inform their audience about ...(depending on the main heading).

I think the students' ICT skills have improved over the course of time. Different level of competencies created challenges but the satisfaction comes when you see their product. They are proud to show off their work and they can focus on their content creation with ease. The main writing of the para was on paper to allow them to focus on writing the main idea and supporting details.

Their understanding of the PAC would be key in this learning of writing informative text.

The students continue to amaze me with their abilities. Though a few students took a longer time to scribe and insert captions, having it on GC allowed them to work on it from home. I was really glad to see a few of them improving it from home or adding the parts that they have left out. I love how this particular student reminds his groupmates to fill in the caption.