Today I finished marking my Year 1 Online Encyclopaedia Entry assessments. There were 51 submissions in total and the whole lot took me about one and a half days to get through.
The assessment asks students to produce an entry on an oceanography or meteorology related topic of their choice for an online encyclopaedia targeted at members of the public with an interest in these subjects and, in particular, school/college pupils who might be interested in studying Ocean Science at university. Each entry consists of 150-200 words of text, an accompanying image (suitably checked for copyright and other use age issues) and three links to websites that provide an interested reader with additional information on the topic. I get a big range of topics and this year I had everything from snowflakes to thunderstorms to El Niño to the Gulf Stream to asphalt volcanoes. But every year I seem to get one topic that becomes strangely popular – in the past this has tended to be either hurricanes or tornadoes and so I verbally discouraged students from picking these topics when I set the work. This year the hot topic was ‘hydrothermal vents’ and so I have now read plenty enough basic descriptions of these systems to last me a few years and will have to remember to add this to my list of topics to avoid next time around.
Every year I think about actually creating the encyclopaedia by turning the best submissions into entries but every year time passes and the project remains just an idea. I now have 4 or 5 years worth of entries so there ought to be enough half decent ones built up to enable me to generate something fairly easily. Maybe this year will be the year that the idea finally bears fruit, and in amongst my store of entries I would hope that one of the entries on ‘hydrothermal vents’ will be good enough to make the cut…
Tim O'Hare 