Designing Digital-Age Learning Assessments
Project-Based Learning Tool Evaluation
The project-based learning tool that I used this week is rubrics. Rubrics are very important because they allow you to assess real products fairly, and they allow students to know ahead of time how they will be assessed. I use rubrics all the time and will continue to use rubrics. One rubric tool that I have recently become impressed with is the Canvas rubric tool and integration with the Canvas SpeedGrader application. Some of the things that I like best about it are that you can just click on the box for the students score, or you can add comments to each criterion as well. This tool made it very easy to grade 135 students fairly quickly. This is a screenshot of the common formative assessment (CFA) that I gave where the students created a color wheel. The students uploaded a picture of their color wheel for me to assess them, so I had the picture of the color wheel on the screen next to the rubric. The only downside that I have found using this tool is that there is a little bit of a learning curve for creating that rubric, and when grading uploaded pictures the pictures are so big that you cannot see them unless zooming out to 35% which makes it a little hard to read the rubric. In the future I want to incorporate more of the students reflecting on their own work. I don't think there is a way for the students to grade themselves in Canvas, but that is a feature that I would love to have.
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Summative Assessment Tool Evaluation
I decided to use Nearpod again this week to focus on summative assessment because it is the tool that worked best with my curriculum this week. As I said last week, Nearpod is definitely a tool that I will continue to use. This week I will focus on its strengths and weaknesses as a summative tool.
I really like that the students can respond in multiple ways. Some digital assessment tools limit the format of questioning, but there are not many limitations with Nearpod. My biggest dislike is that the program bugs out fairly often. I gave this presentation on the left to 5 class periods and it only worked for 3 of them. With formative assessments that is not a big deal, but with summative assessments it causes more of a panic about how to collect data without the tool you were relying on. In the future I would have a back up plan all ready to go in case Nearpod decides not to run again. My students love this tool. They like having the screen closer to them (this helps a lot with vision problems because essentially everyone is on the front row). One of my colleagues asked if I had problems with students going to other sites while we were doing this. I have, but because I have the Nearpod app on my iPad I can walk around the room and check that all students are on the appropriate screen without much trouble.
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Formative Assessment Tool Evaluation
I have recently been getting into using Nearpod with my students. This week I put together a quick Nearpod on the parts of the sewing machine.
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I will definitely continue to use Nearpod with my students. I really like that there are a variety ways of getting student responses, such as multiple choice, poll, true/false, short answer, and draw it. I also like that I can set the pace of the presentation, and the students can't move ahead or get too far behind. The downsides to this tool are that every student has to have a device in order to participate and sometimes seeing all of the results can be a little cumbersome. In the future I will include more interactive questions into my presentation because the students really liked that aspect of it. Below is a screen shot of the draw it question that I asked. In order to really see the answers you have to click on each one individually.
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Gamification Reflection
My sixth grade class this year has been horrible at controlling their impulses and talking out of turn. Some days I would lose 20 minutes of instruction in trying to get the class to stop chatting. Emailing parents, changing seats, and my normal classroom management routine were all ineffective. I decided I would use Class Dojo to track individual behaviors and send that information to parents I told the students that if their ratio overall was negative, they would not be cooking or sewing with us because they were not demonstrating that they could follow directions which would be unsafe in the lab environment.
This is what happened:
Suddenly, behavior was a game, and they have been playing to win. They could see their progress and track trends of good and bad behavior at home. My behavior went from 75% to 85% positive instances in one week! This is what my class looks like now:
This is what happened:
Suddenly, behavior was a game, and they have been playing to win. They could see their progress and track trends of good and bad behavior at home. My behavior went from 75% to 85% positive instances in one week! This is what my class looks like now:
I will definitely use this for the rest of the trimester (which is as long as I will have these students). I like how quickly behaviors changed when they could look up their "stats" for the day on their phone or computer. I also like the response I got from parents who could see exactly where their child was. It was no longer "My child couldn't possibly be the problem" I now get comments like "I can see her biggest problem is talking out. She is participating well, but we will work on the chatting at home."
The downside to Class Dojo is that it takes an obnoxious amount of time to put in the behaviors. Maybe it won't be so bad when I get used to where the students are on the screen and can find them faster, but I wish there was a way to put them in a seating chart so I could find them faster. In future classes, I will implement this sooner if needed, while I feel like it is kind of childish, my 6th graders love it!
The downside to Class Dojo is that it takes an obnoxious amount of time to put in the behaviors. Maybe it won't be so bad when I get used to where the students are on the screen and can find them faster, but I wish there was a way to put them in a seating chart so I could find them faster. In future classes, I will implement this sooner if needed, while I feel like it is kind of childish, my 6th graders love it!