Thing 12 - Assesment, Evaluation & Survey Tools

1. I love google forms! I thought this was so easy to use. Although, I did have to search online to figure out how to modify my form once I was in this spreadsheet view. I had to go to Form....Edit Form. That was obvious once I figured it out. Also, the forms don't number the questions so I manually did that. As I was viewing my results, they are not in numerical order as you can see. Not sure why that happened, but I will investigate that online as well so I can get that figured out.

Anyway, I was able to change the theme and copy and paste the URL into a Moodle page that I made for the students and they were all able to take the quiz the same day. I loved it. I feel this is very educational as students will be working in an online environment in college. The are very comfortable working in this environment, but I think the more that teachers use these tools, the more everyone benefits.

It is really funny that I am on this Thing because I have been wanting to make a rubric for Weebly. I want my middle school students to make a small webpage and I have procrastinating. Now I can make one to meet this requirement and for my students. I have used a rubric with every assignment I have used in my classes for the past 15 years. That seems like an exaggeration, but it is true. I do not understand how to grade an assignment without one. My rubrics always list the criteria, points possible and points earned. I usually make a table in Word then outline the requirements I want them to meet for each assignment. These are all posted on Moodle for my classes. I love when use the word "rubric." I feel like they really understand that I am giving them the chance to get a perfect score on every assignment because I am outlining the criteria with the point value assigned to it. How simple, yet effective. I only give students one copy of a rubric for an assignment. If they lose it, they need to login to Moodle to reprint another one. It has been a great system for me as a teacher and it makes my students accountable.

2. This rubric is for the students making a wepage using Weebly. I cannot believe how easy it was to use Rubistar! What a wonderful resource. I spend countless hours working on rubrics and I am constantly modifying them once we are done with a project. This will make it much quicker for me to initially design a rubric. Rubistar will definitely become a regular part of my teaching tools!

3. Our district is now using Data Director as a student warehousing tool. We have had two in services on how to use it and we teachers still have no idea what to do with it! We use PowerSchool as our grading program and are a bit frustrated that we have to import data now into Data Director to take it out again to put it back into PowerSchool. The "experts" tell us that it is a lot of work in the beginning, but then once that data is entered, it will be a valuable resource for teachers and parents. We our trying to show that what we are teaching is actually being absorbed. We are tying to have pre-tests and post-tests and show student achievement. This is logical, but is seems like putting all this data into a Data Warehousing system is a bit overkill. I feel most parents are just happy know know their children are learning something by the end of the school year! The administrators need the data, but I'm not truly convinced this is what the parents want. But, I digress. I definitely agree that FERPA/HIIPA is important when dealing with students.The student's data should be protected and other students should not have access to files that don't belong to them.