I am entering into my 11th year teaching. Looking back on my journey, it is clear to me that my fascination with technology and its role in the classroom has been the most transformative element of my teaching career. Embracing new tech tools and dreaming up ways to effectively implement them in the classroom has been a truly creative outlet for me, and one that has pushed me to be innovative, thoughtful, and intentional in all that I do and create.

It is great to know that peer assessment can be a time saving, effective form of feed forward. However, we cannot expect our pupils to complete all of our marking… can we? Teachers hate marking books! I have never met a teacher that said: “I have a lovely big pile of books waiting to be marked on my desk; I can’t wait to get started!” Marking takes time that teachers just do not have.

Assessment of any type is completed to provide pupils with a way of moving forward with their learning. It should not be completed in one large batch just before a work trawl. The marking method that follows was developed as a result of me wanting to mark every piece of work that pupils complete but simply not having the time. I took an existing idea named plus, minus equals and developed my own method of delivery that helps me save time while still effectively assessing pupils’ work.