Digital Assessment Resources

As I spend a lot of time looking at resources for teachers and practices related to assessment, I have uncovered a few quality resources that not everyone may be using.  This post will discuss digital assessment resources which can be incorporated into your class.

Project-Based Assessment Resources -

• PDE SAS Portal
• Assessing in a PBL Unit
• PBLWorks Gold Standard Project Design (formerly Buck Institute for Education)

Continuous Diagnostic / Check-Ins Based on Standards - 

• IXL
• Edulastic
• Formative

Questioning and Discussion Resources - 

• Cult of Pedagogy's Discussion Techniques
• Teacher.org's Discussion Techniques
• NSRF's Protocols

These resources all are either free or have at least enough free access to make them useful.  Check them out and let me know what you think!

Mindfulness

Yesterday I had a wonderful collaborative meeting after school with our secondary English department.  During that time, we discussed the impacts of technology on how students write, including their planning and execution.  They were in agreement that technology has not been the best influence when it comes to getting students to have an attention to detail in their writing.  This is probably why mindfulness has become such a popular topic in schools.  With that in mind, I'd like to share some resources K-12 related to Mindfulness.

Giulia Forsythe via Flickr

According to UC Berkeley, Mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment, through a gentle, nurturing lens.  You can watch the expert Jon Kabat-Zinn discuss it further here.

At the elementary level, we see students get overstimulated and then begin to act out.  At the middle school level, the students are changing physically and emotionally and cannot always tell you what they are feeling.  At the high school level, we have seen students get so stressed and overwhelmed that they shut down.  Mindfulness can assist them in managing their emotions and their stress.  Here are some resources to incorporate it into your daily classroom instruction:

• Mind Yeti - A cute program for elementary with videos and animations
• Calm - shared previously by teachers from Opening Days
• Mindful Schools - perfect for educating yourself more on the topic, including videos and techniques
• PBS Mindfulness Teacher's Guide
• MindUP Resources - an SEL curriculum program that also shares small teacher resources on teaching Mindfulness (from Goldie Hawn's Foundation - who knew?!)
• Still Quiet Place - from Amy Saltzman, practice breathing videos

ISTE highlights

Welcome back!!  The school year is fully under way now and we are all settling back into a routine.  The air is turning crisp and we are redecorating with pumpkins and mums.

Photo by Carrie A. - https://www.flickr.com/photos/27353377@N04/15383799350/

During the summer, Greg, Andrea and I attended the ISTE Conference in Philadelphia, PA.  For our first blog post of the year, I want to highlight a few takeaways that I hope will be useful to you.

LEGENDS OF LEARNING - This website has a free version which will be very useful to science and math teachers.  It is game-based instruction tied to standards.  For science, it uses the Next Generation Science Standards.  At ISTE, we launched cows into the air and measured their distance.

The teacher can customize a playlist of assignments/games for the students according to their need.  More information on the program and how it works can be found here.

E-HALLPASS - Well, you know all about this one, middle and high school teachers.  This system allows us to keep a digital sign out system for students.  For the purpose of keeping tabs on students, it also allows us to limit which students are in the hallway at the same time, place a limit on how many bathroom visits a student can have in a day, and send a pass to a student that needs to see a certain teacher.  In the past, every teacher had a different system and a different amount of consistency.  Now we have one system and we don't have to interrupt your class to figure out where a student might be.

STORY SPEAKER - Google has a lot of lesser-known tools and this is definitely one of them.  With your Google home, you can make a choose your own adventure story.  I do not personally own one of these, but my dad does any my children love to say, "OK GOOGLE PLAY SMOKE ON THE WATER!" and then giggle when I look annoyed.  THAT is why I don't own one.  Anyway, this tool works with a template that your students can edit, and then you can play it back.  This would be very useful for a creative writing class!

LIFE TAGS - Life magazine has used the power of AI to look back on history through its many years of publications.  You can search for a term and see all the photographs with that item in them, from coral reef to hat.  This is a great way to look back on history and could serve as a discussion prompt or resource for research projects.

There are many other subject-specific items to learn about.  I hope if I shared them with you that you have taken a look!  The internet provides us with an endless amount of ideas and resources, but sometimes it can be hard to keep up!

Instructional Strategies

Right now I am reading Understanding by Design Meets Neuroscience by Jay McTighe and Judy Willis.  While it's not a light read, it has a lot of thought-provoking research behind it and ideas and resources and SO MANY ACRONYMS.  Education does not need more acronyms, but these might actually be helpful.  Here's some great takeaways.

Instructional Strategies website - this website has instructional strategies listed by topic and content area.  There's also a big long list, but it's overwhelming.

For The Teachers - this website has instructional strategies categorized by the goals of the task - monitor progress, compare and contrast, adapt content, share opinions.  It also has a great page on Differentiation.

WHERETO - This acronym gets to the heart of a lesson. 
W stands for question words - why, where, what and questions to ask include How will I help students know where we are headed in this lesson?
H stands for hook, or how will you capture the students' attention.  Ask yourself, How can I tap into the brain's natural curiosity to hook learners around this new topic?
E stands for equip, or what learning experiences will equip students to meet performance goals.  Ask yourself, How will I equip students to be able to transfer their learning in performance tasks?
R stands for rethink or revise, such as using formative feedback to garner the mastery and the gaps in their understandings.  Ask yourself, How will I provide helpful feedback to help students improve their products and performances through revision?
E also stands for evaluate.  Ask yourself, How can I encourage students' metacognition by monitoring and self-evaluating their performance?
T stands for tailor, as in how will you personalize the experience for students.  Ask yourself, What connections can we make to what matters to them?
O stands for organize, sequencing the lesson to create maximum efficiency and effectiveness.  Ask yourself, How can I make the lesson flow in a brain-friendly manner?

These are just a few of my takeaways from this book.  There are others, including AMT (acquisition, meaning making, transfer), memory scaffolds, and tips for designing effective rubrics so if you are interested in reading it, please reach out and you can borrow my copy!

What's going on?!

It's the end of April and testing season has begun. So "What's going on?!" seemed like a fitting introduction to this post. Up is down. Down is up. Will we ever make it to June? No worries, we think that EVERY year and we ALWAYS make it!


What's going on in this picture is actually a discussion technique for students posted each week by the New York Times. This is what their website says:

Students

1. After looking closely at the image above (or at the full-size image), think about these three questions:

• What is going on in this picture?

• What do you see that makes you say that?

• What more can you find?

2. Next, join the conversation by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box that opens on the right. (Students 13 and older are invited to comment, although teachers of younger students are welcome to post what their students have to say.)

3. After you have posted, try reading back to see what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting another comment. Use the “Reply” button or the @ symbol to address that student directly.

Each Monday, our collaborator, Visual Thinking Strategies, will facilitate a discussion from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern Time by paraphrasing comments and linking to responses to help students’ understanding go deeper. You might use their responses as models for your own.

4. On Thursday afternoons, we will reveal at the bottom of this post more information about the photo. How does reading the caption and learning its back story help you see the image differently?

This is great for any ELA or history teacher at ANY level to get students talking, making inferences, and talking about their thinking. Science teachers that observation is an important part of the scientific method, so it could be used to teach them to observe the world around them in a systematic way.  You could pose the visible thinking strategies questions to the students. This closely mirrors what we know about teaching students to practice close reading.

Some ideas for its use include:

• Using it as a Monday Google Classroom discussion prompt
• Giving the students the picture and letting them annotate around it
• Having them think-pair-share in partners about what it reminds them of in order to make connections

My favorite picture is this one - What's going on?!

How will you use this resource in your classroom?

Google Earth

Over the weekend, my son and I discovered that Google Earth has partnered with Carmen Sandiego, the old books, computer software and game show for kids from the 80s and 90s.

Credit Jason Scott, Flickr - https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/40483310431

You can now use Google Earth to move about the world and chase down Carmen based on the clues given at different sites. 

It starts in London and then the game interviews locals and based on those clues, it asks where to go next.  For example, "She changed all her money to Yen."  That would lead us to choose Tokyo!

If you guess correctly, you might get a glimpse of Carmen Sandiego.  Once you have completed the game, you catch the Crown Jewels Caper.  This is a great, engaging way for students to practice geography skills.  It could be used as an extra time activity, like many of you do with Epic, Night Zookeeper, Prodigy, etc.

Other than this game, Google Earth also allows you to see 3D renderings of many famous places throughout the world.  You can also drop the person into any blue area and see the street view.  For example, I was able to see this "fuente" in Granada, Spain.

Beyond seeing what our house looks like, this allows students to gain that global perspective.  There are other activities built in too, including one with Jane Goodall.  This could be part of an extension activity on her research or a reading of one of the many books about her.

Check out what's new with Google Earth and see if it could enhance one of your lessons.

Critical thinking

When searching for a definition of critical thinking that would apply well to a classroom setting and the instructional design of a teacher, I was discovering that the meaning of this term is as diverse as the students in the classroom.  My favorite definition so far is over-simplified - "thinking to produce judgment" - clear, concise, to the point.  But the skill itself is at the highest levels of Webb's DOK - analyzing, synthesizing, supporting a claim.




Since learning is largely social, one of the best ways to get students to think critically about the judgments that they are making is to hear the alternative judgments that others are making and support the viewpoint with evidence.  Some great discussion techniques for the classroom include:

• Think, Pair, Share

• Four Corners

• Socratic Seminar

• Fishbowl

• De Bono's 6 Thinking Hats

Sometimes students who are not normally active participants in the in-class discussion can feel more successful with an online discussion, such as in Google Classroom.  Another website I ran across recently which allows students to participate in a discussion, make a claim and support it is Kialo.  According to Common Sense Education's review of the site, "It's a good platform to teach the importance of reasoned, respectful arguments when trying to persuade others."  It can be used to participate in public or private discussions through the teacher platform.  As we help students learn how to build an argument, it can also serve as ideas for good questions to get the students motivated to discuss.  

Students are participating in discussions online through social media, so hopefully as teachers we can use a site like this to guide them to be better 21st century digital citizens.