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)

Getting Students Where You Digitally Need Them

This post originally appeared in the Kent ISD Ed Tech Blog

If you have ever experienced issues getting students to and/or into a website or application, you know how frustrating it can be. I recently observed a classroom of 9th graders in which all students could login to laptops (using network logins they can’t change), but six students were unable to login to their district Google accounts (accounts they have had for over two years but can change). The teacher had to scramble to get them their logins and help them get to the site. It was more than 10 minutes before everyone was where they needed to be. Not good.

This is obviously a problem and certainly one that can be avoided. Here are some ideas that we have seen districts use to make tech use more efficient and fluid:

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)

Feed the Feedback Loop with Google Docs

I presented today at Assistechknow, a very cool assistive technology conference put on by Kindy Segovia and others at Kent ISD. My topic was about enacting feedback in different ways within Google Docs, and it was tailored for the unique needs of special ed teachers but still applicable to others.

One of the things I struggled with is how make the process timely and engaging for students. I always struggle with how to make feedback available in time for action to be taken and for it to be communicated in a way that doesn't turn students off to the process. If they feel dumb or inept at any point, there's a good chance they will shut down. If you don't provide focused responses to their work, they won't grow in optimal ways. My best answer is that each teacher has to hone their tone and even personalize feedback for each student depending on how he or she is.

Whew, add that to the many mind-bending tasks for teachers. Hopefully the content below helps move people towards some measure of success in their feedback pursuits.

What Do Your Grades Represent?

This post originally appeared in the Kent ISD Ed Tech Blog

This is an image of a report card. Though it is obviously dated, many current report cards might look quite similar. There are grades and perhaps some comments but little to no information about what the student can or can’t do. At best, these are vague representations of student ability.

Here are three points from research-based sources that could improve this situation:

1. The most successful schools assess and report proficiency on each learning objective (Ken O’Conner)
2. Schools need to build strong curriculum and provide interventions when needed (Multi-tiered Systems of Support)
3. Schools need to provide access to learning in multiple formats (Universal Design for Learning)

Most would agree that they want to do these three things in their schools, so why isn’t it practiced more? The three big reasons are time, resources, and tradition. For time, it is challenging to set up a system of standards-aligned assessments and resources that provide actionable data. It is also expensive to pay people or buy systems that do it for you, and traditional structures like college admissions and grading practices can be challenging barriers to address.

Fortunately, technology now enables us to do these things without overwhelming our time and resources. We can set up sophisticated assessments, assign digital resources to individuals, and accommodate cooperative learning in flexible ways. At Kent ISD, we have developed a system called Edify that accommodates all of these practices. You can click on this link to learn more about how that works. However, this is not an advertisement for our tool; it is a call to consider your practices and move towards what is best for each student.

No matter what tools(s) we use, we should be striving to create learning structures that capture and organize student data efficiently, provide opportunities for teachers to connect with students in personalized as well as collective ways, and report out to stakeholders in a way that shows details about what a student can do – not just a vague letter with a dash or a plus.

Here are some links to how other tools can or could support a standards-based approach. All have pros and cons, but you can look at what might work for you.

DiscoveryEd, Schoology, PowerTeacher (gradebook endorsed by Ken O’Connor),PowerSchool, and Moodle

Helping Students to not do Dumb (and hurtful) Stuff Online

The image above is a screenshot of a message I found on a student's shared Google Document the other day. The student called me over a little freaked out and said that he didn't type it. I checked the revision history, saw who typed it, and sent that student to have a chat with the principal.

Sadly, this was a class of fourth graders, and somewhat ironically, it was during a lesson on staying safe and helpful with online interaction (link to lesson). Despite the unfortunate effects of the student's comments, it was, what some may call, a highly teachable moment about how our online actions can impact ourselves and others.