SCHOOLOGY!!!!!

G

2	Getting Started	Developing	Proficient	Transfer
Formative Assessment	I’m revisiting / getting familiar with this concept of formative assessment—one of the most high-yielding strategies in education, when it comes to improving student performance.	I design more targeted practice and invite students to play a more active role helping me diagnose how / whether to adjust my / our approach in order to improve performance.	I can design targeted practice that increasingly looks like the desired performance, and I use student performance results and their feedback to inform my / our next steps.	I’ve been / begun practicing formative assessment in other settings to target practice and seek information to inform my /our next steps.

Monica and I have been going full force with schoology.  We have multiple projects going on at once.

1.  Skills Mondays:  Every student takes a pre-test, checks their grade, then assesses whether they need to re-learn the topic using khan academy or other resources.  This acts as a formative assessment for the kids on a topic that they have learned in elementary school, but maybe not entirely successfully or they may have forgotten it.

I have done multiple revisions, and have changed the settings on the quizzes embedded in schoology so I can provide instant feedback to the students.

I'm also doing the same stuff for the 8th grade curriculum.  

This has been a learning process for me, and I am constantly changing the way I assess students while I am teaching them.

OH! I almost forgot to mention how much I am loving EDpuzzle!!!  I get instant feedback from the student if they understand the lesson from a video.  I am following up those EDpuzzles with Eit Tickets on schoology so I also have that data on there.  

I am using socrative as an on-going tool to assess student understanding of grammar concepts and reading comprehension.  I have additionally used kahoot for the same reasons.  Interestingly, I have noticed that as students are engaged in this activity mastery has increased.

I’ve identified and committed to collecting and reflecting on the story of my students’ learning in ways that improve my capacity—and my colleagues’ capacity—to improve student performance.

Formative Assessment

 I consider myself to be in the "developing" phase of this rubric.

Formative assessments help me gage students' level of comprehension in the text we are reading in class. While we read portions of our class novels together, I do assign reading at home and independent and small group reading in class.

This reading is followed by either a subjective writing prompt or a lower-order thinking, multiple choice quiz. Sometimes both.

For subjective writing prompts, I often use google classroom and at times, old-fashioned pencils and comp-books.

For quizzes, I use either nearpod or socrative, which Brian has clued me into. The "team" quizzes are engaging and get the students talking to each other.

To move to the next level on the rubric, I believe I need to use formative assessment to inform the direction of my instruction, and not simply whether or not I need to reteach or reread.

Here is an example of a quiz that includes basic "prove you read and understood" questions and subjective higher order thinking questions created through socrative.

The kids took the quiz in teams of 2-3 and each team was represented by a rocket that raced across my projector screen.

I have been using Nearpod as well as Kahoot as a formative assessment centered around plate tectonics and the vocabulary involved.  Prior to this professional development, the only on-line methods I used was through Google docs and the use of Galileo.

2	Getting Started	Developing	Proficient	Transfer
Formative Assessment	I’m revisiting / getting familiar with this concept of formative assessment—one of the most high-yielding strategies in education, when it comes to improving student performance.	I design more targeted practice and invite students to play a more active role helping me diagnose how / whether to adjust my / our approach in order to improve performance.	I can design targeted practice that increasingly looks like the desired performance, and I use student performance results and their feedback to inform my / our next steps.	I’ve been / begun practicing formative assessment in other settings to target practice and seek information to inform my /our next steps.

I personally do not remember exactly where I said that I was last time that we met.  I do however have a bit more insight on some of the formative assessment that I have used with my students recently.  As far was placing myself on the rubric, I would say that I am moving along from developing to proficient, though not fully there yet. The formative assessment that we (Alison) used Notability, it was pretty cool trying to get the material on there...not real pretty, sorta messy but it worked and it was valuable for us as teachers...The next challenge we encountered was the tech part...the students using Notability and even further using that in their device and accessing it, switching screens and trouble shooting problems...but again this was valuable...as a learning moment. The part I did not like and was the grading...I was not able to give them valuable feedback in time because it was such a pain in the ass to grade it in this particular format.  In the future, Alison and I would like to trouble shoot these problems maybe through schology or some other management system that could reduce screen changing and such.

Nov. 18 Agenda

Formative Assessment Follow Up

Please revisit your learning scale for Formative Assessment

After last session's work with formative assessment tools and your ability to practice in the classroom with one or two of them, please revisit the scale:

• Find it in your Google Drive
• Decide if you should move yourself along the continuum based on this learning and application.  
• Write a quick blog post on our shared Hazen blog with a screenshot of the current scale and describe why you have rated yourself this way.  The key is to add a link to evidence to support your self-assessment

Blogging with students - the power of tagging/labeling

• Sick and tired of blogs & reflection?
• Franklin West Supervisory Union blog

Open Educational Resources:

Online Courses for Passion Projects:  

Driving a Google Search for Differentiation

Open Educational Resources Search