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.
Brian,
ReplyDeleteThis could definitely be used as a useful tool in the classroom. Like you said, trying to understand what students understand and dont understand is a daunting task. As we all know students are reluctant to raise their hands during class because they dont want to feel stupid. Something like this is a great way to get data on all the students knowledge so you know what to review and what not to review and if it is safe to move onto the next lesson. Computerized testing is becoming more of a norm. For example, the Praxis will soon be given in computer form for all subjects.
Also this might have some limitations in certain subjects. Hand written answers with calculations in math, physics and chemistry are vital. Knowing the correct path to the answer is just as important as getting the right answer. Partial credit and the steps taken to get to the answer could be lost in a program like this for these subjects. Overall though, it does sound like an intriguing program.
This is a great tool. Any way you could share how they did this?
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