Literacy Teaching

Learning about INTEL Visual Ranking Tool

January 15, 2009

Visual Ranking Tool – This is a rather marvellous, if a little quiet, online tool for use in the classroom to stimulate and generate discussion.

The site consists of two parts; the teachers workspace and then the team workspace.  The teacher must set up a task that involves teams of learners considering a list of items which they must then rank in an order determined by the teacher.  I used this tool with a group of 30 trainee teachers looking at texts and ranking them in order of most suitable to use as a core text when teaching about narrative structure to least.  I gave them four choices of text which they had to read first.  The tool then allows you to add comments to each object which can be justifications for that placing in the ranking.  This is extemely useful because the comments can be used as a great assessment tool.

Once everything is ranked each team can then go and at the press of a button, compare their ranking with other teams.  I asked them to go and find a team who they were least similar to and to go and talk to them and see if the discussion would change their  minds about their ranking.

So, what did I learn about this tool?

• the more knowledge that the learners have about the items to be ranked, the more items you can include in the list.
• this activity could be asynchronous.  The learners do not need to all be sitting in the same room or all doing the activity at the same time. 
• the tool is better used over a period of time rather than in a one-off session as that would allow for more discussion between the teams and between the teacher and teams and for further thinking and reflection to occur.

The trainee teachers fedback about the tool and said:

• because they had to justify their reasons on the computer rather than something like a post-it, it made them think more about what they wrote
• a great tool for those who are in classrooms that are very cramped and don’t allow for much movement around the room (this was us because the normal venue had burst water pipes so we were squashed into a room that wasn’t big enough)
• the comparison tool and the ability to comment on the other teams’ rankings was found to be very motivational
• one team would have liked the facility to have images/snippets of text included in the tool from the books just to remind then which book they were talking about

This is definitely a tool that I will use again.  Has anyone used the other two tools available from INTEL?

Entry Filed under: epict. Tags: evaluation, visual ranking tool.