EEND 679 Module 1 Discussion

Hey class,

I have to admit that coming into this class I realized that I have a lot of room for growth when it comes to assessments.  Honestly, I focus very little on my assessments, and often refer to them as a necessary evil.  As a life science teacher, I really value experiences or labs and authentic real world examples as my main delivery tool for the curriculum.  I tend to view my traditional assessments as an end game to determine how much info the students retained.  I am glad to see a push in education to include non-traditional tests and quizzes as assessment tools as these are already a huge part of my delivery.  I am excited that this class might help me determine tech tools that will help me deliver these formative assessments to the technologically comfortable and often times savvy group of students I get every year.

As a student, and now as a teacher, I have never been a fan of traditional summative assessments.  I really like how the resources for this module pointed out that these traditional assessments really test a student’s ability to determine what answers are wrong rather than assess what they know.  Alternative assessments provide an avenue for students to display what they know in a much more authentic, and often times creative way.  That is why I see myself including many more of these formative assessments in my curriculum as the years progress.

In biology, I very rarely use traditional quizzes and only test a couple of times a semester.  Although, in our resources they made a point that best practice was to test often within 1 week of learning new material.  I find it much more authentic to use creative projects such as: creating a cell magazine showing they understand organelles, using WeVideo to make videos about small chunks of curriculum showing understanding, or writing a letter as an endangered species to humans about environmental impacts they face.  Although these are more complicated to grade, and require you to make rubrics, I feel they are a more authentic representation of what that students understands and more importantly is able to apply. 

For this module we were also given the opportunity to review a new tech tool for assessment from a list of 65 proven tools for educators.  I attempted a couple of them, 2 which are no longer in service, and settled on a website called Formatives (https://Goformative.com) .  I explored this website for about 30 minutes and was instantly impressed.  You can build mini-units of formative assessments tailored to your individual curriculum.  You can also view and utilize previously made “units” for typical topics in your subject.  Currently we are talking about “Energy” and I found a bunch of useful assessment units for both Photosynthesis and Cell Respiration.  Although I think it would take some time to set up, getting immediate real time feedback of what your students know could be very valuable.  I could even see it used as a means to start a discussion on a topic or a pre-assessment to determine what your students already know about the subject material.

I really like how clean Formatives looks, although I have not previewed it from a student’s perspective nor tried it live in my classroom yet.  It looks very functional and I like how you can group a bunch of different kinds of assessments for the students in one hub.   This can include a discussion prompt, typical KWL, quiz, or an activity for students to work on.  I could see this being utilized multiple times throughout a unit and even one of the hubs students could go to in order to begin a conversation inside or better yet outside of class before the lesson is delivered at school.