Working through and finishing a task.

Throughout the process of working through a scaffolding worksheet, proceeding to a variety of choices for presentation, the students appeared engaged and worked well. This took about three lessons during school time. I made sure the students understood the due date of the task and that they could access all of their work at home. Assignments were to be submitted through the College's content management system (CMS).

After the due date, only six assignments had been submitted. This became very difficult to follow up, as many gave a variety of excuses as to why the work was not given in: couldn't upload to the CMS was the main one. I made it known to the students in the lesson immediately following the due date that not submitting the assignment is not acceptable. They were to submit a hard copy or bring it in on a USB if they were having difficulty using the CMS. I am about to proceed to sending messages home for work not handed in. (Ten students out of a class of 26!) This is by far the highest number of students not handing in work for ANY assignments done this year. On the other hand, marking the assignments was easy enough to do in this format and allowed the students to access a detailed comment and their grades by logging on to the CMS.

I think that, because they are not working with concrete documents, they forget that the work must be done. Also, because they are not using the CMS all the time, they are not constantly reminded that the work needs to be completed - through reminders and use of the calendar provided in this format.

The presentation of the task also required the students to go a step further in their cognitive processes. In order to do this task successfully, they had to assimilate all of the information and give it back in a different format. Many have had a great deal of difficulty with this.