Wednesday, November 13, 2013





Chapter 11: Engaging Teachers and Students in Learning and Self-Reflection





Photo Credit Chaim Zvi via Flickr
 
 
Focus Question 1: What is performance based assessment for teachers and students?
Students are evaluated on their performance based on many different factors including individual group projects, homework, and teacher observations of the student’s attitudes and behaviors. Performance evaluations of teachers are based on different factors, some of which are participation at teacher education courses, new teacher writing assignments as well as cooperating teacher observations of new teacher attitudes and behaviors.
 
Tech Tool 11.2: Online Survey Building Resources
Online surveys are a great tool for the classroom, they give students a voice they may not have, or give them an outlet to share their thoughts on what they may be uncomfortable sharing or too embarrassed to ask in front of the class. Zoomerang provides prompts and templates by broad themes including business and educational. Zoomerang actually keeps an archive of your past surveys for you to use at a later date. SurveyMonkey after going onto its site is now owned by Zoomerang and the same thing now. Poll Builder is based out of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. This site allows both students and teachers to create and use simple polls free of charge. This site doesn’t offer the different prompts and templates that the previous two do but it offers research tools in order to make the polls you make more sound.
 
Summary/Important Points:
There were a few items I didn’t know a lot about until I read through this new, the first being a digital portfolio is a collection of educational materials stored electronically. These portfolios contain what a traditional portfolio would, teaching materials, and etc. but in a digital format.
Democratic schools and classrooms are places where students and teachers are able to make decisions about important educational operations together from the academic curriculum to school climate and rules. I think this is an interesting take on wanting students to be involved in the learning process and having a voice. The definite con in this type of learning environment, which in mentioned in this chapter, is how students can make selfish, uninformed decisions that themselves at the time, including no homework and more social time.
Clicker devices really take learning and classroom interaction to a whole new level. Students use these devices to answer questions instantly. Depending on the model students can answer multiple choice, yes or no, true or false, ranking, numeric and short answer questions. Once everyone in the class has answered a question the responses are immediately posted for everyone to see. This a great way to keep students involved in a lesson and to know for sure that everyone is involved based on how many answers are being submitted.
 
 
Resources:
 
Maloy, R. W., Verock-O'Loughlin, R., Edwards, S. A., & Woolf, B. P. (2007). Problem Solving and Inquiry Learning with Software and Web Tools. Transforming Learning with New Technologies (pp. 174-205). Boston: Pearson
Chaim Zvi via Flickr
"About Poll Builder." ww.gmu.edu. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2013. <http://chnm.gmu.edu/research-and-tools/...>.
"Information." www.zoomerang.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2013. <http://info.zoomerang.com>.
 
 
 
 

1 comment:

  1. Interesting to see that though this book was published just a couple of years ago with emphasis on clickers, the current assessment method is web-based, i.e. Socrative or InfuseLearning, rather than the expensive clicker hardware. Thus, the quick obsolescence of technology!

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