Eclectic Technology

We ask our students to reflect on their work, but do we ask them to reflect on their social and emotional development? This post from Edutopia looks at the importance of self-reflection in these areas.

The author discusses how the brain is wired to do self-assessment, stating:

'When we teach to a child's or adolescent's brain, we empower that student with the "inner resources" that directly affect his or her ability to pay attention, engage, and create meaningful learning experiences. School culture is simply about relationships, and the brain is relational organ designed to survive, think, and feel.'

She has also uploaded three great documents that you may print out and use with your students. These documents are:

* Self-Assessment Rubric for Social and Emotional Development

* Social and Emotional Development Daily Goals

* Social and Emotional Development Questions for Reflection

Working with social and emotional development as an avenue for self-reflection may be new to you, but to help our students gain this ability to self-assess make create changes in the classroom that lead to students feeling safer.

A new infographic from An Ethical Island with a focus on rubrics provides an explanation as well as a section on:
* Why Use Rubrics? What can it improve?

* How to Use Rubrics? A guide for teachers.

Rubrics help students understand the expectations. This post provides information that may help you create rubrics that help students improve their ability to meet the requirements.

As teachers must is expected from us daily and more and more we are asked to do assessments. Many of us think of testing as soon as we hear assessment. This post discusses assessment stating "assessment isn’t always employed correctly. It sometimes gets over, under, or misused. Assessment should work seamlessly into the classroom routine. The traditional test can be intrusive and stressful. True assessment flows into the lessons and gives a constant pulse on student learning."

The author then provides links to five Learnist boards that focus on assessment, specifically:

* Simple Ways to Monitor Student Progress

* Assessment

* Exemplar Rubrics for Assessment

* Socrative Response Systems

* Metryx

The first three boards have seven to ten resources. The last two links are on a board that is called 21st Century Assessment - Digital Documentation and additional resources are also found here.

As many schools move to Common Core the question of rigor is a key issue. States that have tested with Common Core have seen significant drops in scores. Why? The Common Core tests are more difficult than most local tests.

Grant Wiggins states "to significantly raise local standards of performance seems to mean we have to lower student grades." Most schools do not want to do this (and certainly most parents do not want to see lower grades).

He continues to explore this issue looking at rigor, and noting that rigor is currently defined by 3 elements:

1. The difficulty of the task or questions
2. The difficulty of the criteria, as established by rubrics
3. The level of achievement expected, as set by “anchors” or cut scores.

However, he notes that many schools/districts do not get past #1. Why? "The problem of fair/normed grading!"

Wiggins then goes on to the final section of this post, called "Solution: avoid thoughtless calculations based on false equivalencies."

However, there is one more section that provides two helpful pieces of information that may help you create better assessments. It includes Webb's Depth of Knowledge Wheel as well as audit matrix that looks at the Assessment Format (Task Complexity and Context) and Cognitive Demand (Depth and Fluency of Thinking). (See image above).

Additionally, he has included an appendix that has text from Webb for levels 1, 2, 3 and 4 for Math, Reading and Writing.

These are great resources to share with teachers in your district as we move to Common Core.

This website from the University Notre Dame provides great resources to help you embrace media-rich experiences for your students. The site currently has 24 projects which you may explore. Each project includes:

* A brief explanation

* Samples of projects

* Resources to help you learn how to make the projects

* Rubrics

The projects listed include: video story project, infographics, academic poster, book trailer, geographic map and many more.

Although this website was designed for college teachers the resources and ideas are useful for any teacher whom would to incorporate more media-based assignment in their classroom.