Sharing My Thoughts Week 4: Assessment

     Assessment can be a tricky topic for educators and every teacher, principal, parent, and student has an opinion and philosophy about it.  My philosophy revolves around the fact that assessment should be varied.  Assessment is such a broad term and it contains many subcategories that there is so much room for difference.  The main thing about assessment is that it should fit your students' needs.  Assessment will of course require summative grades but it also needs formative and informal assessments that are not graded but are just used to guide lessons and instruction.  Also, students should be well prepared for the assessment.  Teachers may provide rubrics or some sort of guidelines because the goal of an assessment is not to trick students but get an accurate idea of what they know.

    

     During the presentation by Scott Kinkopht, he used a program called Pear Deck .  I was very impressed by this website.  I liked it because besides being a presentation tool, it also was a way to interact and gain formative assessment feedback from students.  It was nice to be able to have a role to play in the presentation besides just watching as an instructor lectures to the observer.
    Another tool that was used was called Educanon.  This was another great tool for teachers.  The one thing that I found the most striking about Educanon is how engaging it would be for students. There is also such a wide array of topics and videos for teachers to choose from.
     As a whole, I really enjoyed the presentation mostly because I felt like I was learning through interacting and watching examples of formative assessment as it was being explained.  There was also a great deal of interaction among the students in the class as they participated. One thing that Scott said that I felt was important was that students can learn without grades, but they cannot learn without formative assessment and that feedback.  You can give a million tests and projects and that does not mean that the students are learning from it. Learning has to be interactive so the teacher needs to ask and seek out student progress and then provide feedback to the student.  This was something that I did not really think of before and I felt it was very meaningful.
     In another portion of our tasks for week 4, we were given an article about Classroom Assessments.  In this reading, I found another striking thought.  The author wrote, "Teachers use formative assessment to improve instructional methods and student feedback throughout the teaching and learning process."  To me, this made it seem like formative assessment is like a grade for the teacher.  As a teacher, it is my job to get the information across to students effectively so that they can process it and use it.  Formative assessments will tell me if that is being done and when it isn't, then I have home work to do to make it work.  It is important to remember that teaching is completely interactive and we all have a job to do to make it work.