May 2 Assignment - Assessment

As educators, we are constantly assessing our students. Informal assessments in the form of observation, participation notes, running records, portfolio entries, and discussion go on in every classroom all of the time. I can tell more about how my students truly understand a concept in science by watching then perform an experiment than I can from reading their answers to a multiple choice, true or false, or matching test. While APPLICATION of knowledge is the true hallmark of what a student has learned, we too often rely on an assessment that is sumative - measuring FACTS that a student has memorized. These sumative assessments come at the end of a unit and do not open doors for further learning. A good example of this kind of assessment is the SAT, graduation exams, semester exams, and unit tests. Grades are recorded in a grade book or put on a data base and becomes a piece of information about the student. The information from the test not only fails to give a true understanding of what the student KNOWS, UNDERSTANDS, AND IS ABLE TO APPLY, it fails in a much bigger way. It is not used to drive further instruction.

Formative assessments - usually more informal- allow an instructor to not only measure true student learning, it provides ongoing information about the student that will allow the teacher to plan and implement future lessons that will fill in any gaps, provide future lessons to strengthen skills or to provide enrichment to the students who have mastered skills.

The use of a rubric is an extremely effective way to measure student learning. This rubric should be detailed and shared with students and parents ahead of time. There are many excellent sites on the weve for creating a rubric. I have used http://www.teach-nology.com/web_tools/rubrics/ I think it is extremely important for students to be a partner in their learning experience. A good way to begin this partnership is to engage the students in creating a rubric that will be learned to assess their learning. When students are involved in setting the criteria for learning, they are more likely to succeed.

I see little educational value in summative assessments that do nothing more than provide data. The purpose of assessment should be to drive instruction and to measure understanding, not recall. Performance based assessment, which involves the direct evaluation of student effort on real learning tasks provides useful material for teachers, parents, and students.

laptops

I presently have a HP Pavilion Laptop that is loaded with VISTA. I am finally getting used to the VISTA, but have been considering buying a MAC. Many people tell me that is the way to go, especially for graphics and for managing my pictures.

Since I have finished National Boards and am almost finished with my Masters program, I am thinking that this may be my best choice.

I teach second grade. Most of th documents I prepare for my students call for simple word processing skills and perhaps the insertion of a picture or graphic. I would still like to use spreadsheets (just learned how - thank you Dr. Wang!) to manage grades, create graphs from information, etc. So what do you all think?

Learning Theories

I enjoyed this assignment - especially looking for a little extra background information other than assigned readings - and what I discovered is that I have become completely at home with doing research on line using search engines and tapping into the library. I'm not sure when that happened - it used to really throw me for a loop!
Our group split the research and I chose the constructivist learning theory. Though I use a constructivist approach with many of my lessons, I do not use it for all. I truly agree that knowledge a student can construct is better understood than knowledge that is merely transmitted to them.
As group leader, it was my job to compile everyone's learning theories after we had all read and edited. This should have been easy - another group member had put together a table for us to use and I thought it would just be a matter of cutting and pasting. It wasn't. I got tangled up in entries that had bullets that were difficult to remove in order to make the document uniform. charts were not all exactly the same and had to be adjusted. Fonts were different. One member added color to subtitles - a great touch, but I had to figure out how to do that to the rest of them too. All of this sounds simple, but to me it was not. The point of this narrative is to say that I actually constructed learning (go me!) by trial and error. I think I learned more than I would have if someone had given me instructions on how to fix things. I will certainly remember now.
The final problem I had was getting my finished document to look just as good on the discussion board as it did on my computer. Even though I saved it in Rich Text format, the one posted on the discussion board had all kinds of spaces that the saved document did not. Here is where I cried UNCLE and called my neighbor to help. We played around with it, and finally were able to post it like it was intended. I cannot even tell you what we did in the end. The end result was that I owed my neighbor a six pack, and I feel like our entry reflected the careful work of my group members.
Here is my question - Why would a document that is saved in rich text NOT transmit as saved? I am wondering if it has anything to do with my having VISTA and other team members having different operating systems. Could they have saved differently?

Technology in Language Arts Instruction

My second graders have been working very hard to use the computer to word process short stories they have written. We have spent hours on keyboarding skills and practice. Still, this assignment is taking FOREVER. Little hands do not easily reach all of the keys. They constantly need reminders about spacing, forming upper case letters, and punctuation. Still, we are making slow progress.
The children are much more interested in their writing and in editing when they do it on the computer. They LOVE spell check (well, who doesn't?), although they do not often stop to think or have enough base knowledge to choose the correct option that is offered. They click on the first suggestion. I try to remind them that you still have to stop and think!
I have one child who has handwriting that is impossible to read. He loves the idea of using the computer, and I do allow this, although his fine motor skills are so poor that keyboarding is difficult for him. There are two schools of thought: 1. allow him to do all of his work on the computer (this requires constant teacher support) or 2. have him do some assignments on the computer and some by hand. This is the strategy I am using.