Written by For me, firsts are difficult. The first day of a new school year always makes me nervous. Meeting someone new for the first time can be intimidating. Writing my first blog post about my work with Cohort 21 has been much the same, despite my excitement about how this experience will help me focus my professional goals and how interesting and helpful I have found my peers’ blogs to be.
So in the name of fighting inertia (knowing I’ve got some of the best educators on my team), here we go!
I know I want to explore using technology to improve my use of assessment as learning. I’ve been experimenting with reflection over the last year and loving what I hear from my students. They are opening up about their test anxiety, letting me know about their difficulties studying and showing their pride when they are able to improve their results. Currently, this is all done with paper and pencil, partly because of the fact that they do test corrections and reflection as a single assignment, and math is just easier to write by hand. I feel like there’s a way to make the process easier for both me and my students and perhaps even engage a few more of them in making the experience more authentic.
Although I have some ideas about what I want to begin exploring, I need help. I don’t want technology that will add nothing to the process. I’m not looking for shiny and sparkly ed tech. I want value in terms of engaging my students, making the process more efficient or improving the depth of their reflection. No biggie, right?
“Nothing happens until something moves.”
― Albert Einstein
I would love to hear what some of you may have tried to integrate technology into reflection. Thanks in advance for helping me to get something moving.
Taking the first step is often a challenge. Finding the correct tech tool to help may require first identifying how you want to differently take in the reflection piece. I know from working with you that you always put the students learning as the first priority, and I think this will serve you well as you begin down this exploration. Best of luck and I will continue to follow.
I agree with you that the tech tool I choose should be an early decision as well as an important one in shaping what comes next.
Thank you for your kind words and the advice!
It is really powerful when you can go back and read reflections from the past and see the progress you have made over time. The student gets to see what they struggled with and how they improved as they persevered through their work. That is why I think having a digital portfolio or journal is really important, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are writing digitally. The students can still write their reflections by hand, a simple digital camera or smartphone can digitize the evidence and then this digital copy could be added to a section of their portfolio or maybe into a shared Google Drive folder. Over time, the student could go back and read over their reflections from the previous assignment or even year and reflect on their improvements or adjustments they’ve made or not made. This could be done with paper as long as the student keeps all their notes together and organize for later reflection. Bags, notebooks, sheets of paper can get lost or damaged but evidence housed in a consistent location hosted in the cloud will stand the test if time.
Other ideas for reflection evidence might be an oral recording, digital writing, or as a series of status updates or tweets with specific tags or hashtags. I’m not sure if you have an LMS but many of our teachers use the one-on-one discussion feature to give students a safe place to reflect with only the teacher as the audience.
From my experience students tend to cringe when they hear portfolio. Maybe using different language to make it more palatable to the student? Process analysis, Evidence of Learning Folder (Elf – only because I have Christmas on the mind), Learning Trajectory, Time Capsule.
Wow, those are some excellent suggestions! I had never thought about keeping track of the reflections and allowing them to look for trends.
You also make a great point about the importance of digitizing the reflections in order to ensure that students don’t lose them. They could easily be scanned and stored somewhere as PDF’s. This would make it easier for students to interact with each other’s reflections.
I agree with you that the word portfolio probably isn’t a good idea since many students do seem to groan at the mention.
Thank you, you’ve given me lots to think about!
Hi Beth,
What a great post – it is a call to action for all of us to begin sharing our ideas and practices around Assessment as Learning.
First and foremost, I would start with the purpose of Assessment As Learning: “Teachers engage in assessment as learning by helping all students develop their capacity to be independent, autonomous learners who are able to set individual goals, monitor their own progress, determine next steps, and reflect on their thinking and learning.”
I love the use of Socrative for these purposes – check in before, during and after learning. It’s a great tool that allows you to download the results and thus track them over time.
I also encourage our teachers to use reflective pieces on assessment OF learning. These can be in the form of short, written responses to prompts such as, “How did you prepare for this assessment? How well do you think that strategy worked for you? etc…”
Get in touch with @econ_teacher1, she’s at BVG and lead a Lunch & Learn about these very strategies.
Looking forward to what you have to say in your next post!
garth.
Thanks for your feedback. I think your idea to revisit the purpose of assessment as learning reminds me how I want students to eventually be able to do this independently.
It also ties in well with Ryan’s comment that digitizing the reflections would be important. Although I’ve been focused on the action of reflection, the management of their reflections adds a whole new layer of deep.
I’ve heard of Socrative, but I’ve never worked with it before. I’ll add that to my list of things to try out.
Hi Beth! I know what you mean about firsts being challenging! Congrats on your first post! 🙂
This might sound fairly low-tech, but one simple way that I’ve integrated technology into reflection is to have students take photos of their work and then analyse it at a later date. Recently my grade 3 students were working on a structures unit. Their pre-task was to create a structure using a given supply of materials and take a photo of it. After the unit finished, they completed the same task and took another photo. Each student created a simple 3-page PowerPoint to reflect on the unit. Page one described the first structure (including successes and challenges), page two highlighted their specific learning throughout the unit (i.e. wider bases make more stable structures), and page three explained how their final structure reflected their learning throughout the unit. 🙂
What a great reminder to keep my eye on all types of technology!
Perhaps one way that I could photos would be to take photos of student solutions when they solve problems in different ways and reflect as a class or in groups about how they did it. Students are sometimes uncomfortable when there are multiple correct solutions in math and struggle to communicate their methods effectively. Maybe seeing their peers solutions would be helpful?
Hi Beth!
I hope the first post on your action plans felt as great to get out as it was to read.
I just wanted to pipe in about the magical wonders of Socrative. I’ve been using it as an “Assessment FOR Learning” and an “Assessment AS Learning” tool this term and I LOVE it. What it awesome, I find, is that you can watch your students’ responses in real time, so you can do immediate intervention if needed. There is no marking on our ends (hurray) and you can set it up so students get immediate feedback on their learning.
Also, you might remember using Kahoot during our first F2F in October. This is another insanely incredible tool for “Assessment FOR / AS Learning”.
I’m also wondering if Poll Everywhere could be a different kind of public / private reflection tool that you experiment with your students. Have you played with that tool yet?
Great to read your thinking on this subject. I like your brain!
Excellent to hear another vote for the value of Socrative! It’s quickly moving up my list of methods to try.
I’ve used Kahoot a couple of times and really love it for assessment for learning. The only problem I’ve had so far is that once students get down on the points board, they tend to lose their engagement and it really disadvantages those with slow processing. I’ll need to think about how I use it and what I can do to minimize these problems.
I’ve also used Poll Everywhere before as well, but only for assessment for learning. Any specific ideas how I could use it for assessment as learning?
Thanks for the article link! I think I’ll use this in forming my next blog post.
I miss Pi Week too! And this year, Pi Day is a big one. 3-14-15 (March 14, 2015) although technically it would round to 3.1416, but who’s counting? 😉
Hey Beth,
Congrats on your post! It is a great read and has opened a great conversation based on the comments that are helping everyone who is reading your post.
I too love Socrative, and what I think is really important with this, is the individualized feedback that you can offer to each student based on the data you get with each Quiz or Exit Card. You can then choose the biggest obstacle of their learning to focus on first when they move forward with the next task and you’ve entered personalized learning – having tasks that are geared to groups of students based on where they are at in their learning.
I have experimented with Poll Everywhere but I also use Google Moderator to allow students to choose different themes they want to explore that day.
Reflection is where the learning happens. Check out this article on reflection and learning.
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/how-assessment-can-lead-to-deeper-learning-bob-lenz
So great to reconnect with you, and I look forward to seeing what you come up with for your action plan! I miss Pi Week!
Thanks for the article link! I think I’ll use this in forming my next blog post.
I miss Pi Week too! And this year, Pi Day is a big one. 3-14-15 (March 14, 2015) although technically it would round to 3.1416, but who’s counting? 😉