Formative Assessments - Checking for Student Understanding

Formative Assessments - Checking for Student Understanding

As teachers help their students grow in understanding and learning, they "take a pulse" during lessons to make sure students are understanding and grasping the concepts. The idea, of course, is to  make sure that once students reach the end of a unit of study or the end of a school year, they will show mastery of the content. In the past, teachers would verbally ask the students and most would nod their heads. Oftentimes, when teachers probe deeper they would find the students really didn't understand and would adjust teaching accordingly.

In classrooms of today, teachers have a plethora of devices (whether BYOD environment or 1:1) for students to use to show understanding. There are many choices for teachers as well from Socrative, Nearpod, Kahoot, Quizizz, and goFormative. Even for classrooms without devices, teachers can use their tablet or phone and Plickers.

I met with teachers this week to show them two of the above-mentioned tools: Plickers & Quizziz.

Plickers is super easy to use provided the teacher has a tablet or smartphone available. Go to the site, create your account and add your students. Next, print the cards. The cards can be used for multiple classes, so for those of you in secondary, you can use this tool as well. You can verbally ask questions or embed them in your presentation. When you are ready to ask the question, simply open the app on your device, select the question, and choose scan. You will see the student's name pop-up on your screen and their answer choice will be recorded as you use the camera to scan the cards. Plickers work for multiple choice and true-false questions. You will need to teach your students how to hold the card and not to turn the cards while you are scanning, otherwise their answer will be changed.

Quizizz is one of my all time favorites. Why you ask? Well, if you ever played Kahoot, you know how much fun that is and how it engages students. Students even love to create quizzes for their classmates. Quizizz is similar except, wait for it...the questions display on the student devices! You don't have to project the quiz and this allows students to work through questions in a different order than their peers and at their own pace. Points are still awarded for speed and correct answers. Students also will see memes after each answer. You can search many of the public quizzes or create your own. You also have the choice to duplicate a public quiz and edit to suit the content you are assessing. Quizizz also provides the option to let the students complete the quiz as homework. You select the date and time the homework quiz needs to be completed. And finally, Quizizz is customizable as you can see from this image.

 

Take these tools for a test run with your students and let me know what you think. My presentation is below.

Cross posted from Teresa's Technology Thoughts. 

Early Dismissal Days: Parent-Teacher Conferences

Can you believe that the end of the first reporting period is almost upon us? I have noticed that teachers have started looking for the paper forms to send home to parents to make appointments for parent - teacher conferences.

                                                                    Image Retrieved 9/28/2015

All the preparation reminded me of a back to school hint about using Choice Eliminator Add-On in Google Forms to help teachers move the process to digital.

So I created instructions for you guys if you want to try it. Give it a go and let me know how it goes. Also, contact your Instructional Technology Facilitator if you want to have the parents automatically receive a confirmation letter to their email via a cool tool called Autocrat.

Cross Post from Teresa's Technology Thoughts.

Elementary Students - Citing Sources

The Keep Calm-O-Matic

Standard 3 of ISTE Technology Standards for Students focuses on research and information fluency. The expectation: Students apply digital tools to gather, evaluate and use information. Our state standards for information and technology skills expect learners as young as 5 to "recognize the importance of respect for the work of others." By 5th grade, the expectation is for the student to "understand ethical behavior (e.g., copyright, not plagiarizing, netiquette) when using resources." The expectation isn't that the students will cite in APA or MLA style. Thank goodness!

So what's an elementary teacher to do when faced with helping young learners from K - 5 cite sources when writing non-fiction texts, reports, presentations, and even producing video content. We do what we do best, we teach.

Beginning with kindergarten, we teach that everyone's work belongs to that person and we shouldn't use it without permission and we should tell how we found the work. Begin with something as simple as having students ask permission of others before taking photos with those iPads. Maybe even have a paper the student must have signed by their buddy before snapping that pose. When using Internet resources, keep it simple by allowing them to copy and paste links at the end of their work. Model for students when you are writing in front of them or even when you are finding resources and sharing with them, include where you got the information.

Fortunately, in our district there are tools to help us during this teaching journey. For example, Discovery Education provides appropriate citation for any item the student uses, all they need to know is where the citation is located and how to copy and paste.

We are are Google Apps for Education district, so utilize the research feature in Google Docs that will help automatically cite...complete with footnotes.

And don't forget to use resources available to us for free such as an easy site to use to help students come up with a copy and paste citation - Easybib.com.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention all the awesome, free lessons for grades 3 - 5 available on this topic from Common Sense Media. Common Sense Media is a great partner to enhance digital citizenship for all ages.

Do you have other thoughts or ideas of how to help teachers with this topic? Please share!

Cross Post From Teresa's Technology Thoughts 

Add a Frame to Your Greenscreen Video

Thinking of bringing history alive or any other subject by making some videos.  

Green Screen by Do Ink is a great tool to make that happen if you have an iPad.  

Often when greenscreening you just replace the backgrond on the video.  I have found that adding a frame such as a tv set or newspaper headline can make the video more interesting or help to focus the topic for the viewer. The images below let you make this happen in a notebook page, old newspaper or old tv set. 

Download created backgrounds: Old TV  -  JFK New Paper  -  Notebook  - Bonus New York Times

Making this happen: (Video below)

Line 1: add a frame from one of the examples above or create one yourself.  

Line 2; add your greenscreen video.

Line 3: add the background that you would like to replace your Greenscreen with.  

Cross posted from Inside the Technology. 

Writer's Workshop: Small Moments & Google Docs

Retrieved from Can't Stop Smiling

Across our county this month, teachers and students are launching writer's workshop Lucy Calkins style. The first unit for writing is about small moments. The goal is to help students grow as writers as they take everyday events from their lives and turn them into stories. Stories that communicate through pictures and lots and lots of writing. 

By the time they have finished, they want to publish their work so others can celebrate the writing with them. Since we are a GAFE district, Google Docs often becomes the first place students learn to publish their writing online for the world to read. Elementary teachers are somewhat hesitant to start the typing process with our young learners because their lack of typing skills makes the process long and laborious. 

Google has been working hard at releasing some updates and they are releasing several that are perfect for the educational setting. I mentioned templates in this post and linked to several other updates.

One of the linked updates is about Voice Typing. Yes, dear teacher friends, your students can read their story and Google will take the dictation and type it for them!

You can find this wonderful gem under the Tools menu. Check out the video below to see just how easy this is. 

Cross posted from Teresa's Technology Thoughts.