The Brown Bag Teacher

Teach the Children. Love the Children. Change the World.

Pic Collages: Technology-Based Assessment

Hello, friends! Today I want to share one of my passions with you – non-traditional assessments – in the mode of an authentic way of assessing students using technology-based pic collages.

Why Pic Collages?

Creating Picture Collages in Word Work became one of our favorite ways to show what we know about our grammar skills. There are many apps you can use to create picture collages, but I like using A Beautiful Mess because students can make a collage of photos and then, write on the collage all within one app. If you’re using a laptop to create collages, you might look into PicMonkey which has fabulous versatility.

Now, through our School’s PTO and grants from Donor’s Choose, I have quite a few classroom devices – 2 laptops, 6 iPads, and 3 iPod touches. When using technology to assess, I place 2-3 devices at Word Work. As you can see below, I’ve added A Beautiful Mess to our iPad dashboard, so students have easy-assess to it and help make it an independent activity.

Our Pic Collage Procedures

When making a collage, students know our establish procedures –

  1. Choose a partner and look at our grammar skill for the week.
  2. Sit with your partner and choose 4 objects/people to take pictures of.
  3. Take pictures quickly and quietly. Do not disturb those working.
  4. After you have taken your photos, add them to A Beautiful Mess.
  5.  Identify the objects you have photographed.
  6.  Save your collage onto the iPad.
  7. Share your collage using AirDrop or add it to our Google Classroom. Once I receive the collage, I tweet it out and share it on our website.

Below are some collages students have made this year. You’ll notice they are definitely 1st graders and love taking silly pictures and adding fun fonts.

Reviewing Grammar Skills

Launching our Pic Collages, we used content we were very familiar with, so technology was able to be out goal. As we become more proficient in using these tools, the content will become more meaningful and less surface level. In these collages, students are representing different nouns around the classroom – people, things, places, and ideas.

These friends took the collage one-step further and added a person, place, and thing to their collage. Also, note my silly face. When you start this project, be prepared to be photographed… A LOT!

This is an adjective collage two friends made. Don’t you love the spelling of ‘colorful’?

A Way to Assess

My friends love creating these collages and they are an easy way for me to assess student learning. When I see the emailed collages, it’s easy to see when students have accidentally added a verb to their noun collage, or put a singular noun in their collage of plural nouns. When I see these mistakes, I can intervene, meeting with the specific students to address misconceptions.
After I receive the collages from students, students love to show their collage to the entire class and challenging them to figure out the ‘Title’ of their collage. Friends then decide what the topic of the collage is and explain their thinking.

Other Ideas for Collages in the Classroom

So, are you convinced that collages are a FUN and easy way to assess student learning? Here are some ways to put this resource into action
  • Reading: phonics skills, vowel teams in the real world
  • Parts of Speech: nouns, verb, adjectives, prepositions, pronouns
  • Grammar: plural/singular nouns, homophones, antonyms, synonyms
  • Math: identifying numbers in groups of objects, sum-themed collages (i.e. Sums of 8: 4 backpacks & 4 cubbies, 7 yellow cubes & 1 white cubes, 6 chairs and then 2 stools), fractions in real life
  • Social Skills (especially at the beginning of the year): sharing, partner reading, manners, kindness, 7 Habits
So friends, what do you think? Do you think your friends would enjoy make collages? How could you use them in your classroom? I’d love to hear your ideas!

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Comments

  1. Tammy DeShaw says

    This is totally cute!! I love this idea and could immediately think of some uses for it in science- food chains, animals, etc! Thanks for sharing this idea!!

    Reply

  2. Nancy Kozak says

    Catherine, I just discovered your blog and am so impressed! Thank you for sharing this. What a fun way for our scholars to demonstrate their understanding of a concept!

    Reply

  6. Mona says

    Love the idea of using collages for assessment! We have a district-wide character building program and our school will have a new anti-bullying campaign and activities this coming year. I think I'll try using the collages with my students in these areas. I've never used A Beautiful Mess, but plan on trying it. Thank you for continuing to share your use of technology. You have such great ideas!

    Reply

    • Kate says

      Absolutely, Mona! The first 9 weeks of school, we introduce the 7 Habits of Happy Kids, and I'm thinking each week we are going to make a collage showing each habit! 🙂

      Reply

  9. mlf says

    I have iPads and would like to incorporate this. Our iPods are all on a district account. If, for instance, I put my email address in, it messes everything up. I wondered how your ipads are set up, if you had this problem, and if so how did you work around it. Also, I tried to take my second gradeclass on Twitter last year. I tried to find other second grade classes to follow; I mostly found first and kindergarten and upper grades. I did follow done that seemed to be posting things my class would be interested in. I followed them and one or two followed us back. However none commented on our posts or on our responses to their posts. This made our Twitter experience less rich than it might have been. Do you have any suggestions?

    Reply

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