In the first formative assessment video we were assigned Mike discusses the correlation between “increased informal assessments and increased student knowledge retention”. Honestly I was shocked. I didn’t think assessing them at the end of each class could actually help them in the long run in remembering the content.  I hadn't thought about it, but since I only see my students 3 times a week I think that using formative-informal assessments could be extremely beneficial for them in my class.  I also decided that my first formative assessment tool needs to be about helping my class as a whole through adjusting my lessons and re-teaching when necessary. Chappuis and Chappuis state, "the timeliness of results enables teachers to adjust instruction quickly, while learning is in progress" (Chappuis & Chappuis, p.22).

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The Assessment & Accountability video discusses the overall goal of assessments should be to guide the instruction and to lead the thinking about the content. Improving my assessments will better help me understand what students need to be retaught. The perspectives of both Castek and Coiro give educators a real way to think about what electronic assessments should do for the students. Their hope is to get teachers to think about new ways to track assessment data to better design and implement literacy instruction with electronic texts (p.546). The skills they listed include: “moving productively across different texts, finding and making sense of multimodal resources, and using crowd-sourcing techniques to ask questions of peers and other experts to make sense of ideas” (p.546). These skills in my opinion as a middle school teacher are so essential to be learning at this young age. They are already so immersed into technology and using the internet that it is a great time to incorporate the use of these comprehension skills in terms of online texts. As I have realized throughout these videos and texts rich content knowledge that is both engaging and involves practicing comprehension skills will benefit students the most.    

 

My e-assessment plan involves informal formative assessments in the science classroom that focus around the main comprehension strategies used in all text readings.  I found a tool through the blog "Take Three! 55 Digital Tool and Apps for Formative Assessment Success" called Kahoot! I forgot that I used it during my student teaching and the kids loved it. Even though it is set up in a quiz format, which makes it seem formal, the kids get pretty rambunctious and end up working together in a way so I wouldn’t consider it to be formal. I love the idea of showing my students their learning progress and success through assessments and not just showing them what they can’t do as well.  I want the stigma of "assessments" for them to be less stressful.  I hope that using this tool with them at least twice a week can help them to get use to seeing different types of questions without thinking they're being scored for answering them.  Through the use of science concepts, vocabulary, and texts of both the non-fiction and fiction variety I hope to help them develop the most important comprehension strategies that they can use in every content area from here on out!

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The idea of incorporating gaming into the classroom is both amazing and intimidating, but sounds very fitting for the time we are living in. The whole idea was based around engagement just as Bennett notes in his article. When the students care they are engaged and give it their all. The designers of the gaming assessment will (see my application below each area):

“(a) posing problems that examinees are likely to care about”:

            -content that they have learned in class and feel confident about

“(b) providing motivating feedback”:

            -points for both speed and accuracy while knowing their place

“(c) using multimedia and other game elements”:

            -online game, music, graphics, pictures

“(d) employing delivery hardware preferred by the target population”:

            -laptops in my room, but phones and tablets too          (Bennett, p.12)