Drawing for Assessment

The Gist: This post focuses on the Show Your Work question type available in the formative assessment website Formative. With this question type, teachers can provide a background for students to draw on or annotate (e.g. a grid or text passage) or just provide a blank space for responding to a prompt. When students are responding, teachers can view the live results and/or choose to display them to the whole class for discussion, review, or analysis. See the bottom of this post for a screenshot of what that looks like. This supports all levels of formative assessment, and is fairly simple to facilitate.

Here is a portion of a workshop I led at the 2016 MACUL conference. It is a guide that takes you through the steps from getting started to responding to results.

More Details: One of the most effective ways to determine students' proficiency on a given topic is for them to demonstrate it visually. This has traditionally been done through paper assignments or on classroom surfaces (whiteboard, interactive board, etc.), but those examples can be difficult for teachers/peers to view and respond to. The Show Your Work option in Formative allows for a quick way to ascertain student understanding while providing students some creative license in how they represent their thinking. Teachers can also respond readily either through the system or in person.

There is much more to explore. This is just one tool to use as part of a more comprehensive approach to assessment. Check it out and see how it works for you.

Screenshot of live result example

More Meaningful Math

In order to understand math, you need to interact with it. Desmos and Geogebra may be the best tools for bringing math to life, and I want to share some features in these systems that make it easy for teachers and students to use them effectively. See below for more:

Desmos (online graphing calculator on steroids)

1. Search the pre-made activities on a wide variety of topics. You can post links for students to access without accounts, or you can sign up and tweak the activities for your purposes.
2. When students have accounts, teachers have access to an impressive dashboard to use when facilitating activities. Here is a guide for the steps involved.
3. Here is a general learning guide for Desmos that I have used when working with teachers.

Geogebra (a geometry and algebra platform built for action)

1. It also has a library of pre-made activities with links that you can provide for students. You can copy existing activities and modify them with a free account. (the editing features are a little bit cumbersome, unfortunately).
2. Similar to Desmos, teachers can create groups (AKA classes) in which participants can complete tasks, provide feedback, and more. See this help guide for more details.
3. Here is a sample activity I created to help provide opportunities for M-STEP tasks without "test prepping".

There is definitely much more to explore with both of these tools, but this is enough to infuse any math class with some boom. Get them acting, talking, and exploring. Repeating question sets is not the answer for building mathematicians; nor is it the way to excite and ignite.

(this post originally appeared in Kent ISD's Ed Tech Blog)

Webcam Blogging - Ideas and Exploration

I have been conducting a number of training sessions involving blogging lately, and through that experience my ideas about blogging in schools have grown. As usual, working with teachers in different circumstances and with different interests led to different thinking and new learning. 

One of these ideas was utilizing webcams for posting images as parts of blog posts, which could include student authors, handmade creations, or other representations. Since most mobile devices have a camera feature, it is easy to snap a pic and embed it in a blog post without the hassle of transferring image files in some other way. 

For example, students could pose as a literary/historical character or display the results of an experiment. Then text can be formatted around the image in various ways for a unique and personal creation. See my example of Odysseus after his run-in with Charybdis.

Odysseus after Charybdis

To access the webcam in Blogger, you can click the image icon and then choose from your webcam. You may get a pop-up asking you to allow access to your webcam. Click the allow checkbox, and you should see a preview of the image. After that, you take the pic, and click to use it. Then you can choose a size, add a caption, and/or click and hold on the image to drag it to a different place on the post and continue writing. 

One potentially helpful tip for doing this with students is to require students to complete the text component of the post before they can explore the multimedia. Otherwise, some students may spend all the computer time taking funny pictures. Perhaps it's best to let them play for a while and then shift to  a focus on text. You're smart - you make the call. 

Look below for some links to resources I've used for training and coaching. Feel free to share ideas of your own in the comments. 

Craig

Blogging With or Without Students 

Making Connections with Blogging (book)

Recording Your World

Intro
Many people feel like they are being watched/ recorded all the time, and in many cases that is true - for better or for worse. They also feel like the details surrounding that are hazy (hence the smoke filter on my image for this post). Despite all the questions and uncertainties, I want to explore some possibilities for recording interactions in the classroom and other parts of education.

Recently I was working with the incredible staff at Crossroads Middle School in Northview, MI (outside Grand Rapids). A couple of the science teachers were describing how students often strayed from small-group discussion topics when the teacher moved away from them. That led us to think about how we could hold students accountable for their conversations, and we developed a plan for them to record their discussions and send them to the teacher. Here is the process we concocted:

Ideas for Supporting Common Core Literacy

Article used for this: Common Core and school media specialist

Crosswalk (blend of Common Core and 21st century skills- from AASL)

• Matches CC w/ AASL benchmarks
• Diff. language but similar set of skills
• With the implementation of Common Core, advanced literacy instruction will go beyond simply providing resources and being a search specialist or helping kids distinguish between informational and opinion texts, says Meghann Walk, the library director of New York City’s Bard High School Early College. Instead, educators will be required to focus on helping young readers actively engage with informational texts—the sort of stuff that students will encounter in college and in their future careers.
• Not enough to find a dusty copy of a Lincoln biography

Non-fiction shift

• Kids shouldn’t have to get all their information from a single snippet of text—they need “access to multiple perspectives”
• May have to do some ‘spring cleaning’
• Media specialists need to hunt for databases and other online resources to supplement their collections
• “Show the administration why those resources are needed,” says Aronson, “and finally, keep track of their usage to show just how well the money was spent.”
• Google Analytics to track traffic (how to add to Google Site)
• Blogger tracking tool
• Weebly Stats

Helpful points from article

• Take the lead and share your skills/ expertise.
• Toot your horn, make yourself known

What if funds are not available?

• Teachers could use help selecting content-area, leveled texts
• Provide content area, web-based texts that teachers and students can access
• School webpage or other online tool of your choice
• Use Twurdy (sorts searches by reading level) and Sweet Search to find up-to-date, relevant, and credible sources
• Teach teachers and students to do this