Online Assessment

Yesterday at my fieldwork location, I got a chance to chat with one of the school’s most tech savvy teachers. He met up with my cooperating teacher to give him an overview on how to set up online assessments through a new Google program that he was advocating. The short quiz he made to display the features had rather ridiculous questions and answers, such as:

The speed of light in a vaccum is:

a.       3.0 x 10^8 m/s

b.      9.8 m/s/s

c.       I honestly don’t care.

After submitting the quiz (with a lot of intentional wrong answers) he then logged into the teacher’s side of the program. It quickly created a data table aligning the names of all the ‘students’ (Tebow, Darth Vader, Trogdor, etc.) with overall scores and their personal answers to  each question. Clearly he had already presented this to several other colleagues to provide a good amount of data entries. You could also see the amount of time taken to complete the assessment and the time it was taken at.

Then we got to the real beauty of the program – a separate organizational structure reveals the deeper details of what the students don’t get. It highlights statistics and patterns about which problems gave the students the most trouble and really brings out the details of what the students’ misconceptions really are and where a review or clarification is badly needed.

Hopefully I’ll get a chance to use something like this in my classroom once in awhile. I can see it being particularly effective being executed a week or two prior to a large unit test so that students can self-evaluate and I can manage my teaching strategies most effectively to make sure their content knowledge is as sharp as I can make it. Sadly, the big limitation on the program is student access – the school obviously has permission to use the program, but there’s a fair amount of red tape involved with granting access to students. Obviously this is a necessity given how dangerous the internet can be for a child, but hopefully in the future programs like these will gain a stronger foothold and students can easily gain permission to partake in these types of assessments.

Interactivity #4

Link to Analysis

In the past few weeks in my classroom observations, I latched onto a ton of great strategies that I saw teachers use, and saw a great opportunity to apply some of them in a mini-unit on magnetism. Typically, units on electromagnetism prove challenging to most students, particularly in visualization, as magnetic and electric fields are completely invisible. I observed teachers using great online demos on SmartBoards in front of their classes, and found a few that really clarify some tricky topics like A/C current and electromagnetic induction to apply here.

In aligning the standards to the strategies and applied technologies, the first road block was the lack of 12^th grade standards for electromagnetism. Along with other common high school physics topics like optics, there’s a lot missing from the NJCCS in our field. The electricity and magnetism standards only went up to 6^th grade, with no deeper knowledge expected afterwards. Thus, a good portion of my focus went into seeing that the 12^th grade standards for science practices were incorporated into the lesson delivery. To accomplish this, I also incorporated some extra technology resources to support a more appropriate lecture, encourage effective social collaboration, and prepare students to independently create a lab project later on in the year. This would involve them returning to sites with online interactive demonstrations and designing a tangible experiment to accompany a selected demo.

The original technology list from the lesson plan only incorporated the lab equipment, magnets and simple electrical circuitry, and a few online resources for clarification. This was essential to the learning, but left room for improvement. My additions of the virtual demos and opportunities for group work deepened learning opportunities even further.