The Best Assessment Apps for Teachers and Education Teachers must assess and observe student progress every day – no matter what the subject. Mobile apps make this easier than ever, enabling teachers to harness the incredible power of real time observation and instant results. We selected some of the best assessment apps to assist you in observing and assessing student learning. Most of them are free – so try them out today! Image courtesy of Education Plus. CC License 1. Price: Free Resource Type: App Available at: App Store and Google Play We can see why NearPod was awarded the Edtech Digest Award in 2012. Teachers -> Are you using the “Nearpod” app to allow students to interact from iPads to your Smartboards? 2. Price: £1.49 (App Store); £0.65 (Google Play) Available at: App Store and Google Play It can be hard to rely on memory to assess how much students have learned – particularly for large groups. 3. Resource Type(s): App Available at: App Store Looking for an alternative to clumsy classroom clickers? 4. 5.
10 Things You Don't Know About Formative Assessment Share with Friends 3KShares Assessments come in varied forms, and they’re executed for different purposes. While summative assessments attempt to measure mastery at the end of a learning experience, the best formative assessments illuminate the strengths and needs of learners throughout the experience, enabling teachers to respond in ways that are just right and just in time. Ready to ramp up your practice? 10 Things You Don’t Know About Formative Assessment 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Eager to learn more? TEAL offers this quick but solid formative assessment fact sheet, with some basic approaches.James Popham is a leading authority on formative assessment, and I’ve learned a great deal from his book, Transformative Assessment. Put more amazing content from Angela Stockman in the palm of your hand. The following two tabs change content below. About The Author angelastockman
The 5 Minute Marking Plan by @TeacherToolkit and @LeadingLearner #5MinPlan Marking is an occupational hazard for all teachers. Whilst ‘The 5 Minute Marking Plan’ cannot do your marking for you (sadly) it will help you focus on the job in hand and help ensure you maximise your students’ learning and your own. Written by @LeadingLearner – Stephen Tierney. Download on TES Resources: Click to download the template This planner adds to a growing number of 5 Minute Plans, including: The thinking that underpins the plan: …seeks to highlight those elements of marking that have greatest impact on learning, namely: Sharing the key marking points (you may refer to these as success criteria). The time spent on marking students’ work must also help you identify common errors, so you can: Require students to correct and improve their work.Re-teach elements of the lesson, scheme of work, programme of study or syllabus to help close key gaps in students’ knowledge, understanding or skills.Inform future teaching programmes. ‘The 5 Minute Marking Plan’ Context: What each section means?
Educational Leadership:Informative Assessment:Feedback That Fits December 2007/January 2008 | Volume 65 | Number 4 Informative Assessment Pages 54-59 Susan M. Brookhart From the student's point of view, the ideal "script" for formative assessment reads something like, "Here is how close you are to the knowledge or skills you are trying to develop, and here's what you need to do next." The feedback teachers give students is at the heart of that script. Student Understanding and Control The power of formative assessment lies in its double-barreled approach, addressing both cognitive and motivational factors. Precisely because students' feelings of self-efficacy are involved, however, even well-intentioned feedback can be very destructive if the student reads the script in an unintended way ("See, I knew I was stupid!"). Recently, researchers have tried to tease out what makes some feedback effective, some ineffective, and some downright harmful (Butler & Winne, 1995; Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Kluger & DeNisi, 1996). Effective Ways to Deliver Feedback
Anglican Schools Partnership Effective Feedback | EEF Projects The project This pilot project focused on improving teachers’ understanding and use of effective feedback. Participating teachers tried to incorporate feedback into their lessons to help pupils understand their learning goals and become able to develop strategies to reach them. The project employed a cyclical action research design, through which teachers reviewed academic literature on effective feedback before developing ways to apply it in the classroom. Existing international research suggests that improving the quality of feedback in the classroom has the potential to improve learning significantly. The pilot evaluation had three aims. Key conclusions Effective feedback has shown promise in previous studies, but this evaluation demonstrates that improving feedback consistently is challenging. What did the pilot find? The approach is feasible and there are some indications of promise. The pilot produced valuable formative information for a potential future project.
5 Ways to Help Your Students Become Better Questioners The humble question is an indispensable tool: the spade that helps us dig for truth, or the flashlight that illuminates surrounding darkness. Questioning helps us learn, explore the unknown, and adapt to change. That makes it a most precious “app” today, in a world where everything is changing and so much is unknown. To change that is easier said than done. How to Encourage Questioning 1. Asking a question can be a scary step into the void. 2. This is a tough one. 3. Part of the appeal of “questions-only” exercises is that there’s an element of play involved, as in: Can you turn that answer/statement into a question? 4. Obviously, we must praise and celebrate the questions that are asked -- and not only the on-target, penetrating ones, but also the more expansive, sometimes-offbeat ones (I found that seemingly “crazy questions” sometimes result in the biggest breakthroughs). 5. So ask yourself this beautiful question: How might I encourage more questioning in my classroom?
Using Critique to develop an ethic of excellence Quite a few twitter followers have been asking me about how do we get such beautiful work from our students and others have been asking me to share ideas about critique. I have to say, there is a multitude of great blogs and useful videos on this subject, but here is some advice which I live by. Establishing a really clear, co-constructed success criteria for ongoing work is absolutely essential for students to have a platform for effective critique and a view of excellence. This can be effectively done in two ways. Exemplar work of excellence. By using exemplar work of excellence from previous students, you can pick out the key criteria for work of excellence. First timers, make sure you know what excellence looks like. If it is a new project, then the teacher should create all the elements of the learning themselves to provide a benchmark from which to agree the criteria. Learning on the Job. As teachers, we are, or at least we should be the greatest exponents of this. SOLO Taxonomy So.
Why is Good Instructional Design More Important than Ever in the Modern World? Although instructional design as a discipline has been around for decades (and probably was at its height in the 1970’s and 1980’s as a profession, its application and use has diminished in the age of easy to use software and access to and use of Internet. This is partly because it is so easy to create a course of almost any type, add as many “bells and whistles” as you like and then widely distribute it to a given audience. But in paying less attention to instructional design than we should we have lost something important and it is therefore high time we recognized that it is more important than ever in the modern world. After all, instructional design is the approach which helps to keep the process of training, coaching or development of any kind (on or off line) to be well-targeted and on track to meet the needs of the individual(s) at which it is aimed. Related Resources