Today my Year 8s used lollies and toothpicks to model elements, molecules, compounds and mixtures. This isn’t anything new. Lots of teachers and students have done this before. However, I decide to allow students to film themselves explaining how the lolly models they made represent elements, molecules, compounds and mixtures as evidence of learning. For one group, I decided to record a question-and-answer conversation on my iPad.
The video showed that this student understood to a certain extent how particles are arranged in elements, molecules, compounds and mixtures. The student did accurately use the lollies for this, but upon questioning, she was confused about how many different types of particles made up her lolly models of compounds and mixtures.
I’d like this type of evidence of learning to be prominent in schools. As a system I think we rely too heavily on written exams and assignments to elicit student understanding of concepts. Having videos such as the one shown above is much more powerful to give feedback to students and to use as evidence of learning. Eventually I’d like each of teacher in my faculty to a collection of videos like this for professional discussions on our students’ learning.
Alice Leung 
It’s certainly a much richer way for the student to assess him/herself and to be assessed; also the potentials for teacher PD to improve their professional teaching practice through self reflection and discussion with teacher peers and senior teacher mentors.
When you did this, did the student get distracted since she was being videoed? And how difficult it is to hold the device considering its dimensions; maybe something like Google glass can influence the way we do assessment in general and practical assessment in particular.
My students are quite used to their learning being filmed so it isn’t a big deal for them to have me talking to them with an iPad recording. I personally don’t find an iPad to be too big. Sometimes I use my phone.
Thannks for this blog post