Over the past week of carrying out my GAME plan and developing ideas along with this week's learning resources, I feel that I have a good plan in place. On the other hand, I feel that in order to achieve my goals aligning with student creativity and innovation I must do a better job in assessing students in the classroom to monitor, evaluate, and provide feedback in order to reach high levels of learning. Now, in doing this, I understand that technology provides many avenues when assessing students through forced-choice, open-ended response, performance-based, or project-based methods. Dr. John Ross supports this idea but also throws out caution that when using technology assistance, alongside with assessment methods, an educator must be careful that the technology assistance doesn't perform the objective that is desired to be evaluated (Laureate 2009).
How does this relate to my GAME plan and it's progress? In order for me to succeed in my goal areas of increasing graduation rates among credit deficient special ed. students, promoting a creative/innovative thinking in the classroom, and more efficiently relating information to parents I must use a wide variety of assessments to better my knowledge of my student's capabilities, my teaching areas of weakness, and areas of needed improvement in certain subjects.
Along with choosing the correct style and method of assessment to fit the needed area to evaluate I must also improve on implementing technology along with the assessment. For example, I would like to explore more performance based assessments that I can use digital videoing to record, document, and provide feedback of positives and negatives. My thoughts with this are that in creating these video files I will be able to build a case for my second goal of promoting a life skills course into our district's curriculum. I envision role plays of real life situations documented through this style that are produced by my students so district administration can view the diverse levels of basic social skills.
Overall, I believe I am on track and performing many details of my GAME plan efficiently but I also believe that there are minor details that need to be fulfilled. Fulfilling these minor details, which are truly most important, will help build the structure of the plan stronger and faster. We all just need to keep plugging along to achieve our goals and promote higher education.
Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2009). EDUC 6713I-1 Integrating Technology Across Content Areas. [DVD]. Assessing Student Learning. Dr. John Ross.
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Ty,
ReplyDeleteMy fiance is a special education teacher at the pre-school/kindergarten age level and she has used FLIP cameras to videotape her students' progress so that she could then send it to the childs parents. It helps the students parents see what their child is capable of doing because lets face it, sometimes parents don't always believe you until you show them the proof. I think my fiance started small by videotaping a child who would only chew food for her and the childs parents didn't believe he could chew food. Now the students parents are willing to practice those same feeding methods with their child and they're packing more solid foods. The only suggestion I'd have is to make sure that the student(s) you videotape can be videotaped. Some school systems have video protection rights for students that must be accommodated.
David Chiarella
Ty,
ReplyDeleteI really like the idea you have of evaluating students more with project-based assessments. I think that assessing many of these projects using the assistance of video cameras will help you out. At my school, there is constant assessment and reevaluation of special education students, and I think the video would be a great means of doing this. The idea that David mentioned of using a FLIP device seems like it would be great to keep in touch with parents, and I think the students would probably think it is also cool. Good luck on your continually improving your assessment strategies.
Josh