Written by 
Information overload has never been greater. Teachers are online looking for resources to support their student learning more than ever. We have Google, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, and likely 10-100 other places that are our go-tos when looking for information.
When we all moved online last March, as my school’s Teacher-Librarian, I took to the internet, like many fellow Librarians, and tried to curate resources for classroom teachers to support their research endeavors, specifically supporting creating learning content for a new online-teaching model. I created this Padlet to support them, but who knows how much it was actually resourced.
I am now in a unique position. I AM the classroom teacher. I’ve switched gears big time and am teaching Math, Language, Science, History and Geography to an amazing group of grade 5 students. When I first found out I would be teaching grade 5, I went onto Instagram and started following relevant hashtags #fifthgrade #iteachfifth – which so far have been amazing. Just yesterday I was served up a neat post about “Famous Fails”. This teacher spends time each Monday highlighting some big failures of very successful people in history. The larger lesson of never-give up, FAIL mindset, etc. are clearly evident and valuable. It inspired me to take it a step further and have my students perform an inquiry on this subject matter. Instead of me researching new “failures” every day/week, I am motivating my students to explore this topic and then present their findings to the class. My slidedeck outlining this assignment can be found here.
Anyways, the purpose of this post is twofold. I am curious how most educators find and curate resources to use in the classroom? Googling? Is Twitter your go-to? Instagram? Teachers-Pay-Teachers? Is there a more efficient way to do this? What are your favourite sites for teachers?
I am also interested in learning more about ASSESSMENT. I obviously studied assessment in teachers college and have a good foundation of understanding. However, I know I need to learn more. So what are people’s go-to resources for being a better evaluator? The value of authentic feedback and how that moviates growth and learning is evident. Where can I learn more about providing authentic feedback?
Thank you in advance! Can’t wait to read about how you amazing people continue your learning.
Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash
Hey @lmustard let’s get the C21 librarian legion to jump into this thread and share. Welcome back @jweening great to see you in the comments as well!
@nbrooksbank In April & May we came together coast to coast to address assessment along with other broad topics that adress hyflex teaching and learning strategies – this might help : https://docs.google.com/document/d/17uv9AlfL3VOuCtUM3thspzHHYKCoJoWEhaKPueAdjk4/edit#
@nbrooksbank what a huge shift this must be for you! And of all the times to make a move like this! I hope that you are managing the massive workload that comes with teaching something brand new.
My best assessment advice is this: focus on the feedback that happens BEFORE you have to assign a grade, rather than the feedback that happens after. Whatever the assessment you’re doing, make the process the most important thing, and make it clear to students that you want to see them demonstrate their learning as successfully as they can. The grade at the end is usually where the learning ends, so try to shift the mindset in your class to one where the focus is on the process rather than the final product. 🙂
Good luck, Nicole!
– Jen
Really like this, Nicole! Some recommendations is to lean WAY into the cohort too. Go back through our archives that @egelleny created on our site and you can cross reference schools and people for their actions plans 🙂
First of all, I love your focus on ‘keywords’…having students track the words they type in google to see which ones produce more successful searches must’ve been a great learning experience for them.
My assessment trick so far this year has been the good ol’ conversation + sticky note! Not very techy, but I get so much out of a quick chat with students and we can get right down to the nitty-gritty of a quick writing strategy or specific math issue. The challenging part for me is to remember to record the interaction so I can come back to it or use it when planning/reporting. I keep a stack of really simple class grids on hand, as well as some small sticky notes (which fit into the grid boxes). Thanks to the ‘silver lining’ of smaller class size and more contact time with students compared to past years, chatting one-on-one with students has actually been easier than ever.