Authentic Lessons and Assessments (ISTE Standard 2)

My question for this module: How can I incorporate more technology into my assessments, particularly to help students access the skills in ISTE-S 1, using technology to get feedback?

When I wrote this question, I will admit that I was envisioning, perhaps incorrectly, mainly looking into summative assessments. I did find some resources to tackle this, but mostly addressing writing skills or projects, rather than the standard paper-and-pencil unit tests I use now at the end of units. A New York Times article called "Blogs vs. Term Papers" (Richtel, 2012)recommends that students write blog posts or other publicly shared pieces of writing to further student engagement. The NMC Horizon Report (Johnson et al., 2012) supports this idea, stating that "as [more and more] learners are exploring subject matter through the act of creation rather than the consumption of content," (p. 14) assessments and teachers need to make a corresponding shift. I continue to struggle with the idea that students must share their work on a global scale for the work to feel meaningful, but I can see that even giving students more access to peer review can create more buy-in with the assignments. This year I used Turnitin.com's digital peer review tools to create a guided peer revision assignment. The students had more opportunities to look at other classmate's essays, and they could spend time outside of class reflecting, rather than the rushed ten or twelve minutes in class. Having an audience helps students take more ownership of their work.

Most of the resources found by myself and my classmates to address ISTE 2 refer to formative assessments. I really enjoyed reading an article found by Michaela Clark called "Technology Enhanced Formative Assessment" (Beatty & Gerace, 2009). This article details the creation of a framework for the incorporation of technology in classes, similar to TPACK, but specifically for formative assessment. My understanding of the importance of formative assessment was reinforced, as "an assessment-centered learning environment weaves formative assessment deeply into the fabric of instruction, providing continual, detailed feedback to guide students' learning and instructors' teaching" (Beatty & Gerace, 2009, p.152 ). This is especially important to me as an IB teacher. The students are responsible for a lot of reading and content knowledge and I need to know what they understand and what needs re-teaching. I need to incorporate a lot more formative assessment into my classroom, and I could make better use of the resources available to me as a teacher at a one-to-one laptop school. Some interesting sites I found are: Socrative.com, SALG for teacher feedback (but which is mostly for the college level), and Virtual Training Suite tutorials for learning about website validity.

Overall, I came away from this investigation with a lot of questions. Formative assessment is great, but I think I really need to start shifting a lot of my units to more inquiry-based, even in the 9th grade, to be able to better build authentic learning experiences. My students struggle with understanding the relevance of history, and inquiry helps with this immensely. Also, it helps build student confidence and bolster the student-teacher relationship. "From Corn Chips to Garbology: The Dynamics of Historical Inquiry" emphasizes that "in order to facilitate powerful and authentic student inquiry, the teacher must be a learner too" (Kalmon et al. 2012, p. 14). The global, interactive nature of Web 2.0 removes the teacher-as-expert model. As stated in ISTE 2, technology should allow for increased creativity and personalized learning. If I am directing all activities and learning, this cannot happen. Students need more freedom, but that needs to start with a solid foundation of teacher-created activities supported by focused formative and summative assessments.

References:

Beatty, I., & Gerace, W.J. (2009). Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment: A Research-based Pedagogy for Teaching Science with Classroom Response Technology. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 18, 146-162. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10956-008-9140-4

Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Estrada, V., & Freeman, A. (2015). NMC Horizon Report: 2015 K-12 Edition. https://www.nmc.org/publication/nmc-horizon-report-2015-k-12-edition/

 Kalmon, S., O'Neill-Jones, P., Stout, C., & Sargent Wood, L. (2012). From Corn Chips to Garbology: The Dynamics of Historical Inquiry. OAH Magazine of History, 26(3), 13-18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oahmag/oas024

Richtel, M. (2012). Blogs vs. Term Papers. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/education/edlife/muscling-in-on-the-term-paper-tradition.html