SRS Showdown

          In our Technology of Educ. 209 class, we did student response systems where we used a jigsaw method in the beginning and a week later, we presented our favorite or most effective online resource tool that could be implemented into a classroom. While watching our groups show their online tool, I realized the variety of ways students could be assessed. Not only will it assess the students, but the teacher could create assessments any form they want from simple quiz to a creative one like drawing, watching videos, or simple short answers and multiple choice. With these formative assessments, they are very beneficial for the students and teachers. By assessing students, the teacher will figure out where the student lies in knowing the content of a subject. Teachers will see what the student understand and doesn't understand then help the student from there on what is needed to be worked. Out of all the various tools I have seen in the SRS showdown, there are a few that stood out to me while watching my classmates engage us in their tools.

          The first tool I enjoyed was the one my group worked on which is called Formative, https://goformative.com/. Something I enjoyed about Formative was that you could connect your Google Classroom to it or make a classroom on it and give the students a code to log in. When creating an assessment, Formative allows you to choose what the assessment is whether it is a quiz, benchmark, essay, and even just extra practice. When making the questions, this tool gives options on what type of question to ask. These options are multiple choice, show your work which is drawing, essay, true and false, and short answer. One aspect that I appreciate about this tool would be being able to see the students take the assessments live. Since Formative gives this option, it allows a teacher to comment on what the student is working on while taking the assessment and show which question they got right or wrong. A final aspect about Formative is it allows a teacher to track students work as a whole or individually. This is an important aspects with assessing students. Being able to track a students work is crucial to further guide and help the student's needs. Yet, the only weakness Formative has is that a teacher with a free account can track a student's progress on assignments up to two weeks which can be an issue when trying to see the students' progress throughout the year.

          The other two tools I thought were wonderful are called Verso, https://versolearning.com/, and Quizizz, https://quizizz.com/. Verso is an online tool to also assess students but something interesting about this tools is that with a teacher's account, it is possible to swap to a student account and vice versa. Being able to swap allows a teacher to be in someone else's class and interact in it. Verso also only assesses students with written answers. This is great since it allows the students to think about what they are writing and engage rather than multiple choice. Also, this tool allows the teacher to group students who may have similar answers to the given question and have them comment and talk with one another. The only downside to Verso is that a teacher is only able to have one class with the free account and may be time consuming to create an assessment since it give options to have a video, picture, or link with the assessment. Now Quizizz is a formative assessment that allows students to take short quizzes online that are in a way creative. Quizizz allows a teacher to import their created quizzes to Google Classroom, Edmodo, and Remind or students can put in the code to take the quiz. Quizizz give quizzes a different view to giving students a random avatar before taking the quiz. It adds an effect to how the students may view taking a quiz allowing it to be engaging. The last couple of these about this tool is that it allows the teacher to change the language of the quiz which is beneficial for the students who's first language may not be English and the second is that the teacher can send the scores to the students' parents. The only downside to this tool is that students are scored on how fast they can answer a question. This will not be the best way to see how well the student understands the material since some may take longer to answer a question than others.

          Over all, this was one of the best activities my class had been able to experience. I have gained a lot of knowledge of the variety of formative assessment tools that are out there. I can see myself using some of these tools to assess my future students and be able to engage them in other forms rather than multiple choice. Lastly, I have learned how to make creative assessments and know how to view my student's development and knowledge of concepts.

Twitter Post 2

After a few more weeks using twitter, I have been able to remind myself to use it as often as possible. Still, I have difficulties engaging with twitter due to the lack of my use with social media. As I continued to be involved with twitter, I have become familiar with how to use twitter rather than the occasional re-tweet of an article I read from EdTech and edutopia. With the occasional re-tweets, I was able to be involved in a twitter chat.

When my professor told my educ 209 class that we had to participate in a twitter chat, I was concerned since I never experienced an online chat with people whom I do not know answering and replying to questions. I was involved in the first ISTEMLN chat of the year. Going into this chat I was not sure of what would be happening nor what questions would be asked. Before the chat started, I thought of a variety of things that could have been asked. Not only this, but I thought it would mostly be the people who were participating asking the questions and not just one person. Once the chat started, everyone who wanted to join the chat introduced ourselves. As the chat began, I noticed that many of students who attend Trinity Christian College participated in this chat. This chat was very different from what I originally thought it was going to be. The questions that were asked in the chat involved asking my own experiences with different technology tools that could be used in a classroom. When the questions were asked, I had to think about what to say because I was never asked these kinds of questions before. One questions asked about what technology tool transformed my teaching and the students learning in math and science. Since I am currently still a student and not teaching, I had to think about what I technology I used in high school. As I thought back, I remembered my math teacher having us use Desmos to graph functions, lines, parabolas, etc. in trigonometry. 

In the end of the twitter chat, I was pleased of seeing a variety of answers the teachers gave in which technology tools they used in their classroom. By reading these answers, I am able to become a bit more familiar with what tools are out there to use in any classroom setting. I still am on the edge of not using twitter in the near future only because I would rather not use social media as often. In the mean time, I can now see why many have twitter for educational purposes. Twitter allows one person to share their ideas, classroom projects, and a variety of technology tools, including some video games like Minecraft, for others to then gather information and ideas to then create their own lessons involving these tools for their classroom. From what I have seen so far, there are some things I might take from twitter to use in my future classroom when introducing technology to my elementary students.

Module 5 Flip Project

       For my education in technology class, we had to do a project where each student had to create a flipped classroom video by ourselves or with a partner. The flipped classroom is where students will receive a video to watch the night before class of the material that would have been taught during school hours. Since students watched the lesson the night before, it will then allow the entire class to work on activities, ask more questions and do examples, and allows for more engagement with their peers. When the class was given this assignment, I was not worried as much since I had this type of classroom in high school for physics. Along with creating a flipped classroom video, we had to make a multiple choice quiz that went along with Bloom's Taxonomy.

       With this project, I collaborated with a classmate to create a lesson for a third-grade math class. We created a lesson teaching the students what quadrilaterals are and different characteristics of a couple of them like a square and rhombus. To create this lesson, we used the tools we have already been introduced to throughout this class which are WeVideo, Notebook 17, and Screencast-O-Matic. As we put together what we were going to teach, we had to make sure the students could understand and follow along to what they could see and hear. In our video, we drew on the Notebook 17 while recording to help the students understand what we were talking about in that specific moment. When it came to creating the quiz, we had difficulties.

       Creating the quiz for our lesson was the challenging portion of the project for us. From learning in class, there are ways in which a multiple choice quiz should be presented for the students understanding but also had to challenge them. This is where Bloom's Taxonomy helped and challenged us while making the quadrilateral quiz. Bloom's Taxonomy challenged us to have the students apply and analyze the different shapes and characteristics of a quadrilateral on the quiz. Since our video covered most of what we wanted to put on this quiz, it was difficult to figure out a way to challenge the students. In the end, we were able to make a quiz that worked well.

       In the end, I can see the flipped classroom working well in a variety of grades since many children know how to watch videos online. It will be beneficial for each of them since they can watch a lesson at their own pace and can pause and rewind as many times needed. Since my experience with a flipped classroom during high school went well, I would be willing to use this technique to teach my future students. It will allow me to then give them more one-on-one time to help them understand portions of the lesson they might have struggled with.