Failure to Understanding

Failure to Understand

“Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding.” – Burt Rutan

I was not feeling well this week, but regardless of my feelings I still have work to complete. This week our focus it's still towards formative assessment. Our seminar discussions were a continuation on the understanding of what formative assessment is, and how we can appropriately use it within the classroom to help guide student learning. Within our seminar, I voiced my opinion that assessment should be about the holistic aspect of a student and not just the paper to pen knowledge that we pass along to them.

I must say that I enjoy the two Frontline assignment for this week. The assignment on assessment drift reiterated the assessment creation project that we did earlier in the year. It proved to be a great reminder of how to properly create an assessment and to ensure that it serves its true purpose. This Frontline portion was a clear reminder of many of our standards, 4. H. 1 states that teachers use multiple effective ways to assess student learning and utilize the data to enhance student learning. The second Frontline assignment focus on three diverse types of assessing. Ipsative, Norm-referenced, and Criterion-referenced are three ways to assess student learning through assessment and data. Of the three assessment base approaches, I feel that the norm-referenced approach is a little too aggressive for the 21st-century approach we are using in schools today. These assessments are in line with our standards, mainly 3.a.2 and 5.a.1.

My Twitter account was abuzz with our second educational Twitter activity. The #games4ed crew came together to discuss teaching vocabulary in the classroom and ways to make it more technologically inviting for students. My input within the discussion was not as grand as others. I did gain a wealth of knowledge on effective ways of implementing technology towards my vocabulary assignments, and with help from some of my friends in this group, we will soon be looking for ways to implement these recent technologies according to the NCSCS. As soon as we have some of these locked in, I look forward to sharing them with my colleagues and professors.

While lying in bed hacking up a lung Friday afternoon, a thought dawned on me. I know I may be late to the party, but I realized something that I've been ignoring this complete process. We are currently learning to become effective North Carolina professional teachers, but it really came to me that standard 1.c is one of our crucial points for our education at Gardner-Webb University. As future professionals, we are putting the practice in now to improve ourselves through more professional development each week. This will help us to shape the lives of our future students and instill in us a desire to continue to improve as professionals to give the best quality performance we can always. Though I may not succeed as I always want to in every objective I'm given, the quote that we read in Frontline hit me in the heart and is what I will strive to remember from this point on.

That's all for now...

Always learning, Always Growing;

William B. A. Alspaugh  

It's My Turn?!

Its My Turn?!

 

In this week's class, we were to investigate the purpose and types of formal assessment. As we can learn formative assessment is any form of checking in for student understanding. This could happen in the beginning, middle, or end of a lesson. These types of check-ins are typically quick and are only centered around current or future learning. Formative assessments are not cumulative, they must be done while learning is taking place. They're helpful for teachers because they give an understanding of student knowledge at the time. As NCTCS number 1a2 states, educators know appropriate use of formative assessment and use data to identify the skills and abilities of students.

My week also included being the leader for the seminar to my surprise. Anyway, sticking with the theme of formative assessment, I was able to find an interesting article on the many forms of formative assessment available to teachers today. The conversation was geared towards understanding these forms of assessment, and how we would effectively use them within our prospective future classrooms. I also pulled from our Frontline assignment, and ask the question, "how can we overcome the limitations we will face with homework?"

I personally believe that the list of formative assessments covered in an article including but not limited to, Kahoot, Smart Lab, and Quizlet are all effective tools for assessing students within the classroom but also can be used outside of the classroom. I believe that with using these tools I could not only assessment students formatively, but also be able to overcome some of the limitations with homework from a technological aspect. I do know that there may be a few issues due to some students not having the technology available outside of school, but for a vast majority of students, this will not be a problem.

My learning continued outside of class with Twitter this week. The conversation centered around virtual reality devices and their use or lack thereof in the classroom. Since I never thought of using a VR device for any educational uses, I really had to sit back and observe the conversation rather than give input. I did learn that there is a lot of uses for VR, however, they use in the elementary classrooms is still in progress. There were no applications that were discussed that would be effective in any of the elementary education standards that I am aware of currently.

I would have to say this was a full week for me within this class. Revising and preparing for my upcoming lesson was also a big part of my week. I am looking forward to the opportunity to teach the lesson, but am extremely nervous and hopeful for a great outcome.

So until next time.....