This module has explored the use of technology tools for both formative and summative assessment. As you think about how you will implement formative and summative assessments in the online and blended environments, what are some of the factors you need to consider?
I know I would have to spend a great deal of time making sure my teaching covered both the content of the ELA course as well as the technology needed to complete those assignments. I resorted to using other people's (for the sake of this exercise, I'm going to call those youtube producers "experts") - so other expert's instruction for this project. I also only focused on one tiny aspect of what I normally do with characterization and the play Romeo and Juliet. I am proud of the fact that my assessment plan was formatted with section 508 in mind, but the text I put directly on the LMS pages, I'm less than proud to admit, were not all as carefully formatted - neither have they been recorded as I spent WAY too much time this week trying to figure out one very user-unfriendly tool: Hot Potato. I'm glad the discussion included ClassMarker. Too late for this project, but I'm planning on playing around with that on my next professional development day. To be honest, I hit several walls this week, and I was frustrated to the point of wondering if I had made a mistake in doing this class now, during the school year, instead of waiting until summertime when there would be fewer urgent demands on my time. Now that I'm done (I hope!) with this week, that feeling is passing, but it was intense!
Besides the time factor and the technology parallel teaching, I find the actual LMS and the web tools students can actually access at my site are weighing heavily with me this week. For instance, I can access Google through my Teacher Accessibility permissions at my district; students cannot - they cannot connect to tools through their gmail accounts or facebook accounts, either. The district is afraid of what they might be able to access (I work in an extremely conservative area, so parents support this lock down even though most of the kids I ask can get around parts of the firewall by using smartphones, hacking, or using proxies or translation services). So I found myself getting pretty excited about things, going to school the next day, and discovering that it cannot happen at my school. Glogster, though, seems to be okay, so I'm hoping really hard that I can incorporate a glog project this year - maybe even for Romeo and Juliet as I've planned in this week's project. But then, there are no computers for student use in my class, so I have to weigh the number of hours I can access the lab with the logistics of getting students to the lab, signed in, registered, and finished. It's as discouraging as invigorating to contemplate using these nifty new tools.
Specifially for assessment - assuming that I could access any of these tools without worrying about being randomly or summatively blocked - I need to consider building more self assessment into the plan as this is what will replace my keen ability to read student body language/behavior in the brick and mortar model. I call on students several times a day - and I have an intricate system for tracking and assigning credit for "participation points" in my efforts to assess - constantly - what kids know as we move through a unit. As for the Summative assessments, those seem to be mainly project based for me anyway - and now it's just a matter of including the technology or moving over to Web 2.0. I sound like I'm bragging, even to myself - so sorry! - but I do a lot of the feedback and the PBL discuss in the last two modules already. My challenge is to find Web 2.0 tools that can make it easier for me and students to produce and interact online as opposed to the usual face to face that I'm used to. All I can say for today, though, is it probably won't be "Hot Potato."
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