Archive of ‘teaching’ category
Formative Assessment
7 Smart, Fast Ways to Do Formative Assessment
Within these methods you’ll find close to 40 tools and tricks for finding out what your students know while they’re still learning.
edutopia.org/article/7-smart-fast-ways-do-formative-assessment
Entry and exit slips
Exit slips can take lots of forms beyond the old-school pencil and scrap paper. Whether you’re assessing at the bottom of Bloom’s taxonomy or the top, you can use tools like Padlet or Poll Everywhere, or measure progress toward attainment or retention of essential content or standards with tools like Google Classroom’s Question tool, Google Forms with Flubaroo, and Edulastic,
Low-stakes quizzes and polls: If you want to find out whether your students really know as much as you think they know, polls and quizzes created with Socrative or Quizlet or in-class games and tools like Quizalize, Kahoot, FlipQuiz, Gimkit, Plickers, and Flippity
Dipsticks: So-called alternative formative assessments are meant to be as easy and quick as checking the oil in your car, so they’re sometimes referred to as dipsticks. These can be things like asking students to:
- write a letter explaining a key idea to a friend,
- draw a sketch to visually represent new knowledge, or
- do a think, pair, share exercise with a partner.
Interview assessments: If you want to dig a little deeper into students’ understanding of content, try discussion-based assessment methods. Casual chats with students in the classroom can help them feel at ease even as you get a sense of what they know, and you may find that five-minute interview assessments
Flipgrid, Explain Everything, or Seesaw
Methods that incorporate art: Consider using visual art or photography or videography as an assessment tool. Whether students draw, create a collage, or sculpt, you may find that the assessment helps them synthesize their learning.
Misconceptions and errors: Sometimes it’s helpful to see if students understand why something is incorrect or why a concept is hard. Ask students to explain the “muddiest point” in the lesson—the place where things got confusing or particularly difficult or where they still lack clarity. Or do a misconception check:
Self-assessment: Don’t forget to consult the experts—the kids. Often you can give your rubric to your student
Real-World Thinking Skills
5 Ideas for Developing Real-World Thinking Skills
https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/5-ideas-for-developing-real-world-thinking-skills
IDEAS—Inquiry, Design, Evaluation, Argument, and Systems Analysis. Let’s unpack these processes:
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Inquiry is an investigative process that seeks out understandings and explanations—of observations, outcomes, concepts, and events. The process is driven by thoughtful questions that can be researched and explored in different ways—for example, by analyzing data or documents, generating models, or conducting experiments.
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Design is an iterative process that results in the development of a new product or process for addressing a need, solving a problem, or improving an existing product/process. It includes clarifying a problem or need, generating possible solutions, testing/evaluating solution options, and developing a plan for implementation.
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Evaluation involves selecting and applying appropriate criteria for assessing the quality, significance, or merit of something. Evaluation can be used to judge things like products (e.g., the strength of a bridge), outcomes (e.g., the accuracy of a stock market prediction), and processes (e.g., effectiveness of group work).
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Argumentation is a reasoning process for debating and supporting an idea or position. It involves making a claim and justifying it with reasons and evidence. It can also involve critiquing an argument by challenging its claim or the reasons or evidence given to support it.
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Systems Analysis is a process for understanding a system’s elements and how they interact. It includes analyzing the various elements in a system and predicting how changes to any part(s) of the system can have both short- and long-term consequences.
Ikigai
How To Find Your Ikigai And Transform Your Outlook On Life And Business
Ikigai (pronounced “eye-ka-guy”) is, above all else, a lifestyle that strives to balance the spiritual with the practical.
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https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=ikigai
high probably motivators
categories: teaching
Administrators feedback on assessment
categories: evaluation, teaching
the comment below that posting:
Margaret Teall: Maybe if they’re experts on assessments. But…are they?
Microcredentials skills gap and accessible education
Micro-credentials: The solution to the skills gap and accessible education
By reformatting existing programs into micro-credentials and certificates, you can market these new programs to employers and bring new learners through your doors.
At the end of 2020, 80% of U.S. employers said they had more difficulty filling job openings due to skills gaps compared to the year before — and the skills gap isn’t going away anytime soon.
In fact, a recent Gartner survey found that 58% of employees need new skills to successfully do their work.
To start offering micro-credential programs:
- Identify gaps: You don’t have to start from scratch to create a micro-credentialing program. Instead, take a proactive approach by comparing the skills offered in your existing courses with the abilities and expertise employers are searching for in their job postings and identify any gaps that micro-credentials can fill for organizations. You can then align the skills offered in your current course offerings with organizations’ needs.
- Create stackable degree programs: You can also make your micro-credentials stackable and build them into a larger qualification (e.g., offer them as degree credits) to entice employees to further their education at your university. This elevates the overall value for learners who may want a degree down the line.
Coursera and the higher education
categories: e-learning, instructional technology, learning, mobile learning, online learning, teaching
Coursera and the uncertain future of higher education
Coursera is blurring the lines between itself and institutions. The implications for the future of college education are profound.
The future of higher education is being led by a publicly traded company in California that is growing like gangbusters. Its online platform has a portfolio of thousands of courses from the world’s leading universities, corporations, and nonprofits.
Coursera, which since the spring has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange, is valued at 7 billion dollars and seems to be making all the right moves.
While college and university enrollments have been declining during the pandemic, Coursera’s enrollment rose from 53 million to 78 million students this spring—an increase greater than total U.S. higher education enrollment.
Coursera is only the tip of the iceberg of an explosion of non-collegiate higher education providers. They range from libraries and museums to media companies and software makers, not to mention a burgeoning number of online providers just like Coursera. Microsoft and Google are both offering more than 75 certificate programs.
As our society becomes more fragmented and divided, we have reason to worry that higher education’s transformation will further fragment us.
Equally important, we need to reintroduce a common curriculum to strengthen social bonds. General education should focus on the shared human experience—linking our past with our present and future, our heritage with the realities that will confront us today and tomorrow.
In the new Coursera world that will be increasingly corporatized, we need to ensure that we don’t lose our core values, our ethics, and our ability to tell fact from fiction.
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more on Coursera in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=coursera
Teach To Think Through Problems
categories: teaching
Teach Students to Think Through Problems — Not Google Them
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-09-09-teach-students-to-think-through-problems-not-google-them/
rather be transparently wrong than opaquely right. Part of the process of my teaching is to let students see my thought process when somebody asks me a question, rather than giving them the answer.
Online and Blended Teaching Readiness Assessment (OBTRA)
Development of the Online and Blended Teaching Readiness Assessment (OBTRA)
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2021.673594/full
Readiness for teaching online has been defined as the qualities or predispositions of an instructor that exemplify teaching high-quality online courses (Palloff and Pratt, 2011). Mental and physical preparedness (Cutri and Mena, 2020), a willingness to create active, collaborative learning environments that foster a sense community (Palloff and Pratt, 2011), and acceptance of online teaching (Gibson et al., 2008) also demonstrate readiness for the online teaching and learning modality. An inability or unwillingness to adopt student-focused approaches and the perception that online courses provide low quality learning environments (Gibson et al., 2008) and are not worthwhile (Allen and Seaman, 2015) can be important barriers to the successful transition to teaching online.