Summative Assessments don't have to be BIG

Summative assessments don't have to be BIG assessments. They can assess small, targeted skills. One nice way to do this is to use the Question feature in Google classroom. To assess whether kids can write an effective thesis statement for example, you could ask students to submit their thesis statements as an answer to a Question in Classroom. Classroom’s format makes grading the answers to Questions very quick. And remember, no comments on summatives!

Make a great looking website in 10 minutes

As a parent, I'm finding myself on school and teacher websites quite a bit these days and I've got to say that they really do make an impression. Unfortunately, a bad website can make a pretty bad impression.

If you've looked at your splash page recently, you might think that it's not a very good representation of you as a professional.  Until recently, there wasn't much we could do about it - that tool was the only tool we had.

But not anymore. The "New" Google Sites makes slick website creation very, very easy.  I made this website in about 10 minutes, including the time it took to type in my schedule.  This can come in handy if you are updating your district splash page for a more professional look, or if you are creating websites for your classes or activities.

How to create a quick great looking website

To get to the new google sites, follow this link.  Once you're there, you can start a new page by clicking the red plus circle on the bottom right side.

Once you've clicked the red plus circle, you'll get a blank website and menus along the right side.  As with any tech like this, feel free to play around and see how it works.  

A little more help

One nice feature is called Themes. It's in the menu on the far right side.  If you scroll to the bottom and choose the theme Impression (no pun intended from the intro!), it defaults to the Hinsdale Central color scheme!  This is the theme I used for my quick website.  

After you've chosen your theme, all the other menus are simple drag and drop editing. The Pages menu can get a little tricky if you try to layer pages, but I can help you with that if you need it.  

A lot more help

For those of you interested in a little more guidance, click on the More Menu (Just to the left of the Publish button) and click on Take a Tour!

For a comprehensive set of directions, check out Google's resources here.

When you are finished

Put in a helpdesk ticket to update your splash page link.  They will need your name and the link to the published site.  To get that link, make sure your site is published (the button on the top left). Then view the published site to copy the link from your browser.  

Introducing: Quizlet Diagrams

Quizlet recently released their Diagrams feature, which allows teachers and students to create the same dynamic learning Quizlet is known for, but with drawings instead of just flashcards.

Here is my favorite example so far:




While it may take a little time to build one, this is a nice new tool in the tool box for contextual vocabulary study.

Enjoy.

Feedback given = feedback received?

We often talk about how much feedback we give students, but John Hattie argues that it's more important to think about how students receive our feedback.

With technological tools making it easier to provide more rubrics, more comments, more audio and video notes and more feedback generally, it can seem like it's virtuous to give more feedback to kids and let them sort it out.

But, it's far more important, according to John Hattie, to "worry more about how students are receiving your feedback . . . than increasing how much you give."

In a previous post, I introduced the idea of cognitive load: that kids can only handle so much information and that overdoing feedback is literally a waste of time.  It's a great reminder that kids are humans, busy, sometimes even overwhelmed, humans, who need you to provide focus and direction for them to learn what they need to.

Besides, if we only think about feedback being "given", we miss the point. It's not really what we write on the paper that matters, it's what the students do with it.

From this short piece on feedback, here are a couple of take-aways:

1.  Feedback is hard to use.
2.  Students need a chance to use feedback in order for it to be effective.
3.  We should try to help students see that improvement is possible.

Just for fun: Do you speak Shakespeare?

From today's NYTimes:

Turns of phrase from Shakespeare you probably use.

Introducing: The Rise Model of feedback

Think about your last observation.  It's nerve-wracking, even for a veteran teacher, to have an administrator walk into your room, laptop in hand.  When you get to the post-conference, it is completely disheartening when the only news they have for you is bad.

Even if they try to couch their negative feedback in coaching terms, it's still hard to hear:

"Have you considered using method x instead of the method you used?"

"What have you done to try and make class more engaging?"

These are tough questions and they make us worry about our teaching, our reputation and even the security of our jobs.

Instead, we'd like to hear some of what we did well, maybe an affirmation of our value to the department, or a thank you for the work we've been doing.  If that could be paired with some suggestions for future projects or a partnership with a colleague who is an expert in a particular field, it's a great post conference.

But how do we give feedback to students?

If we only write comments about things that need to improve, it's disheartening, maybe even demoralizing to the student.  Even if the ratio is 50% positive, 50% negative, the student is likely not motivated by the results.

Emily Wray created the Rise Model to help create "positive, productive changes" to student work.  (She's also got a fascinating website).

The Rise Model

While the Rise Model is certainly useful for teachers to provide student feedback, this same model can be used for student-student peer feedback.

Wray also created a Rise Model for self-evaluation.

Introducing: Draftback

I recently learned about a Chrome extension called Draftback.  It will playback all of the revisions made to a google doc as a movie. It will also create graphs that show how the revision of the document has progressed over time.

On one hand, this is a very cool way to look at how documents we write (or kids write) actually come into being. It shows every keystroke (slowly or quickly - you choose the speed) that created the finished product.

On the other hand, Draftback can be used to look at document creation of potentially dubious origin.  If you suspect a student copy and pasted research into his research paper, you can watch it happen in Draftback.

Draftback will also create a graph of the creation of the work, showing times and dates of revision as well as the position on the document.   Here's a screenshot of what that graph looks like.

You can imagine how valuable a graph like this would be to help students understand their own writing process (and to help us look at our own).

Draftback is a Chrome extension available for free here.  

If you'd like to read more about it, here's an article.

Let me know if you'd like help getting started using this very cool tool.

Why students ignore our comments

As teachers, it makes us feel better — like we’re doing our jobs — when we give lots of pointed feedback. But how much does it help kids when we overwhelm them and they can’t actually use any of it? - Matt Miller

For many of us, the problem with feedback we give to students is that they just don't seem to want it that badly.  

One of the realities for our students is that our feedback is only one part their very long days. Depending on what that student has going on that day, the analysis of Hamlet we assigned might not be very high on the priority list.  They twelve comments we make on that analysis just might be an awful lot of commentary on a piece that has several problems:

1.  It's over.
2. The student won't be writing another one.
3.  The student might not have cared about it that much anyway.

In a recent blog post, however, Matt Miller cites another, more subtle problem:

There’s this thing called cognitive load. It’s the total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory. I figured that if I gave students more than one or two suggestions during their writing, it would be more like cognitive OVERload. So I chose my feedback wisely.

It’s like coaching little kids to hit a baseball. They have a LOT to learn. If you tell them seven different things to remember when they go to bat, they won’t remember any of them.

One way for us to provide feedback to students that they will actually use is to make wise choices about when and how much feedback we give.  Miller's answer is to provide it immediately (by walking around the room) and to give the most pointed, specific feedback possible.

It's a nice discussion of feedback in the first half of the post.

Preaching to the choir?

We certainly think that laptops improve learning, but until now, there haven't been many studies to prove it.

In December, Binbin Zheng, Mark Warschauer Chin-Hsi Lin, Chi Chang published "Learning in One-to-One Laptop Environments" in the Review of Educational Research. They reviewed "65 journal articles and 31 doctoral dissertations published from January 2001 to May 2015" to try to answer whether laptops are effective at improving learning.

In short, the answer is yes.  From the paper:

The most common changes noted in the reviewed studies include significantly increased academic achievement in science, writing, math, and English; increased technology use for varied learning purposes; more student-centered, individualized, and project-based instruction; enhanced engagement and enthusiasm among students; and improved teacher–student and home–school relationships.

This research should encourage proponents of thoughtful technological innovation in the classroom that their efforts have wide-ranging and important positive effects.