Week 12 Formative Assessment

This week will be my final reflection post and I will be discussing Formative Assessment.

                

There are a great number of opinions about assessment.  Some believe educators teach too tightly with the content on their assessments, others believe that assessing only the content in the standards doesn’t allow educators to be creative teachers.  I am a big believer in balancing formative and summative assessment.  As I have stated in my blog posts before, I can somewhat be an old-fashioned type and believe that if it isn’t broken don’t fix it.  I am talking about summative assessment.  I believe that summative assessment is still the bread and butter of understanding and analyzing where your students are in the learning process.  I know it is a new day and age and the students today are different to those of twenty to thirty years ago, but sometimes I think we have to drop all the bells and whistles and take a test. 

                

Now, that being said, one thing that I do plan to incorporate when I begin teaching, is what I like to call “advanced summative assessment”.  With all the new technology that we have seen and used throughout our class, these partners must be incorporated into today’s education.  My “advanced summative assessment” will be the use of bell work and exit tickets using technology partners.  I believe using shorter summative assessments like exit tickets helps alleviate the stress of taking a large test, but still gives the teacher useful information about their students.  Both of these tactics also play a part in classroom management.  Bell work can help get your students focused and on task as soon as they sit down in your class. 

               

In class last Monday, I used and created a short assessment activity using PearDeck, which I can’t link here because I have to add specific emails to share over google drive or we must be in person to take the assessment using a code just like the application, Kahoot.  We did however take this assessment in class and my fellow students and I enjoyed it very much.  Similar to Kahoot, students can join this activity using a code with a device that has internet connectivity.  The cool thing about PearDeck is it is not just a test with multiple choice questions.  PearDeck creates questions that allow students to answer questions correctly in different ways. 

               

After watching Scott Kinkoph’s video, it may be simple, but the thing that stuck with me the most is that he said, “when it comes to learning, especially using technology, students can move at different rates.”  This may be a no brainer, but before I heard that I never asked, how can I control the rate of my students’ learning with technology.  Now looking back, I realize there have be many applications that help control that.  One application can even control the reading level of how each student can view the lesson.  Every student can be on the same lesson, but the teacher can control the reading level for each student if need be.