Video O Da Week! - Episode I

In this new series, I will be re-posting great informational videos about Education, EdTech, Social Studies, Global Education, and Citizenship. With so many great sites and information being posted daily, I wanted to take the ones that I felt were the most useful and powerful and share them again on this blog.  

I will be posting these periodically and providing context and information to go along with it!

Here is the first in our series, originally posted on Edutopia: http://tinyurl.com/mzpeedg

Blended Learning: 

Making it Work in Your Classroom

A great site to help define what this learning program is all about and how you can start leveraging it in your classes NOW: What is Blended Learning? 

Chubby Bunny and Reasons to move away from Summative Assessments

As school starts this week for the majority of American Educational Institutions (and thank goodness for that), teachers prepare to introduce themselves to a whole new crop of students, go over procedures and talk about the dreaded "Grading Policy."

I recently read a piece on Edutopia about Formative Assessments, which you can find here: Dipsticks: Efficient Ways to Check for Understanding - I started to think long and hard about WHY these types of assessments do not get as much attention as their older, much more maligned sibling does. The summative assessment, for much of the modern world, is the end all to be all.

Benchmarks, Midterms, Finals, SGOs... summatives rule the roost in education right now. They are in the news, they are tied to teacher performance, and they are all some students think about because of the emphasis that is put on them. Teachers do their part too - they weight summative assignments much higher than other types of grades in their room to reinforce the severity, and finality, of these assessments. 

Summative assessments also keeps the great tradition of "cramming" for a test alive.

Cramming for a summative test is like trying to shove 100 marshmallows in your mouth at the same time while trying to say "Chubby Bunny." Have you ever tried to do that? It's not easy. You may get them all in but you aren't going to swallow them all and when it's time, its all going to come back out the same way in went in. Now try putting marshmallows in your mouth one by one without swallowing or letting them out out. Cramming information in your brain the days leading up to, and the night before, a big test is the same way. 

Teachers need to help students out. We need to focus more on the formative assessments because that is where true learning, reflective learning, takes place. Having common formative assessments can help with that and starting off with just a few in place to play with this year should happen. You can add these to your repertoire quite easily and they generally take very little to put into place in your classroom. 

Below is the cycle that ALL formative assessments have in common. A solid formative assessment will help and direct the teacher on how to teach that child, or group of children and help to CHANGE the direction of what was planned. They are to help inform all of what is going on, what needs to be addressed, and where things can potentially go. 

For instance, take exit cards. Students can give you a one sentence answer to what they learned or an answer to a well formed formative question right before they leave. That information can be, and should always be, used to shape the next days lesson depending on the answers. It gives the teacher a real chance to listen to their students and the students a real chance to let the teachers know, "Hey, I need some more time with this."

Formative assessments also allow the student to understand material in smaller chunks, like eating one marshmallow at a time. Using this method, its easier to swallow the information and keep it down, this focusing on the learning, not the actions of trying to keep it all in at once. 

Some great ideas for Formative Assessments can be found here: 

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/what-are-formative-assessments-and-why-should-we-use-them


So while I don't think the big bad midterms and finals are going to go away anytime soon, formative assessments are the true key to helping your students understand what they are learning and will help them retain that information long after its been taught. 

So this year, put more emphasis on your checkups before your students checkout - you may be surprised with what you find out!