Mobile Learning and Assessment

Can use a wide variety of mobile devices and of mobile apps for capturing student learning, analyzing it, providing feedback, and recognizing learning success.

Identify the specific learning goal

Have QR codes for exemplars that students can refer to anytime during the learning process

Pre-assess with mobile device: Need data to go to one location for analysis

Monitor and collect student data: Transform non-data activities such as texting into data ones. Constant monitoring of students. Daily/weekly review of data. Mobile device  spreadsheet of students’ scores

Use formative assessment: In-class performance tasks and short quizzes

Provide feedback: QR code to New strategy to overcome learning gap; Differentiate in strategies

Peer assess: While doing task on app or after learning task

Self assess: See progress and evaluate how to become better

Use Eportfolio: Wiki Edmodo ….

Celebrate successful learning

Other resources:

Search my education and technology blog bit.ly/hgtblog (Am on EdTech’s “The Honor Roll: 50 Must-Read K–12 Education IT Blogs”).

My modern language blogs are  now at  http://bit.ly/imprml

I have developed many  Spanish activities that allow students to begin to express themselves and to begin to move toward spontaneous speaking as in a natural conversation at Teacherspayteachers:  http://bit.ly/tpthtuttle

My three formative assessment books, Formative Assessment: Responding to Your Students,  Successful Student Writing Through Formative Assessment, and Improving Foreign Language Speaking Through Formative Assessment, are available at   http://is.gd/tbook

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Problems with Institutional Assessment

Assessment dominates education from K-12 through college.   There are different types of assessment, formative (helps students improve) and summative (grading of students).  However, institutional assessment  involves the bigger picture of how an institution or a department is doing academically.

In institutional assessment, teachers enter data into a  mega-database. For example, teachers may enter their students’ grades  on each section of the final. Then someone, often a department head,  analyzes the overall results using the online data, to assess the student learning across specific courses and across the department.

Institutional assessment has some basic flows
1) Most institutions have not identified a specific  enough curriculum that can be assessed.  Many contain very general statements of learning.  For example, English might state that  students will write a well-written essay. Has the English department specified what constitutes a well-written essay?  Likewise, a Modern language department may have the curriculum statement  “The student should speak in sentences that have relatively simple structures and concrete vocabulary”.  What does “speak” mean?  Does it mean to be able to talk about one’s life, to hold a conversation. to repeat from memory?  When there are only general  learning statements, there cannot be any  meaningful assessment.

2) If departments have identified specific learning goals, what is the priority of those learning goals? For example, in English the purpose of writing is to communicate ideas or feelings.  Shouldn’t the organization of ideas be more important than the spelling?  Or does spelling/grammar have the same assessment weight as organization?  Likewise,  in  Modern Languages, are all skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) treated equally in assessment weighting even though both in class and in the real world, people listen and speak almost double the amount that they read and write?  Have the specific learning goals and their priority been communicated to the teachers/students through a department website/wiki?

3) The departments do not have exemplars that show the quality that they expect of students.  Does the English department share  electronically with all English teachers essays that show what constitutes a high level paper,  an acceptable paper, and a non-acceptable paper?  Again, are these exemplars on the department website for each course?  Does the Modern Language department share audio files of  a good ten sentence conversation through their website or an their department app?

4) They have vague assessment tools.  The English department has a generic rubric (has good organization,  conveys ideas, etc.) that can be interpreted differently by different people.   What type of essay will be the written? An autobiographical essay requires a very different approach than a contrast essay.  In Modern Languages, how will writing be assessed – holistically or analytically?  If different educators can come up with different scores for the same student, then the assessment tool does not accurately measure learning.  Teachers can receive a digital image of the rubric and work assessed using that rubric.   How well does the assessment tool match up with how the information was taught in class?  Is the assessment tool such as the final developed  at the  competency level or at the highly competent level?  Students may be competent but not highly competent

5) The departments do not do a thorough analysis to get at the root problem once they have discovered a gap.   If the students do not achieve well, was it due to the  students’ lack of effort, a misunderstanding of  how to answer the  assessment question, a specific word in the  assessment question,   the thinking level of the test question,    the structure of the assessment item,  the textbook, the textbook’s powerpoints,  the teacher’s explanation, the homework, or  the online work?  Usually much additional exploration is needed to determine the real reason for the gap. Once the  department identifies the gap, what  specific strategy will help the students over come this gap?  Will the department suggest  technology-based strategies that appeal to students such as Youtube videos, interactive websites,  interactive apps  and that help the students directly overcome the gap?

6) Most important of all, how does the institutional assessment help  students improve in the course right now?  Most institutions assess once a semester.  After the analysis, the department  focuses on  what changes will happen in the future year.  Unless regular assessment is done in small intervals  throughout the year and changes made almost instantly, then the assessment does not benefit  the present students.  Next year’s students may be very different than the students who took this assessment.  Classroom teachers need access to the online data and analysis so they can take class time to provide  the students new learning strategies.  Then, students can be successful learners!

How does your institution assess  student learning?

My Spanish spontaneous speaking activities (20+) includes Modified Speed Dating (Students ask  a question from a card-whole class), Structured Speaking (Students substitute in or select words to communicate in pairs),  Role Playing (Students talk as people in pictures or drawing from 2-4 people) and Speaking Mats (Can talk using a wide variety of nouns, verbs and adjectives to express their ideas- pairs or small group),  Spontaneous Speaking (based on visuals or topics in pairs),  and Grammar speaking games (pairs or small group). Available for a nominal fee at Teacherspayteachers:  http://bit.ly/tpthtuttle

My three formative assessment books:   http://is.gd/tbook

Is it really MOBILE learning?

Mobile learning or mlearning is the hot topic.  An interesting question is “Is it mobile learning or just wireless learning (not fixed to wired device)?”

Do students do their mobile learning from their usual desk/chair?  If they stay in one spot, it is truly “mobile” learning or is it just wireless learning?

Students do mobile learning when they

1) Interact with other classmates.  If they regroup and work within their new group, they  are mobile. For example,  on one day, they work in small groups to brainstorm ideas,  each student independently develops one of the ideas on his/her own and, then,  the regroup to put together their ideas.   Their learning does not happen in just one fixed  location, their desk.

2) Use data from various parts of  the classroom. They may have QR stations where they do various aspects of the learning goal.  An art teacher  may have QR codes  in each corner of the room that help students compare/ contrast four styles of painting for the same theme of family.  Modern Language students may be asked to look at a poster, painting, or picture, pretend to be in the picture, have a conversation, and record that conversation.

3) Capture data from other parts of the room.  Science students may use their mobile device to take pictures of their growing plant over many weeks, of how far the sun’s light go inside the classroom over several months. Math  students can take pictures of  real math problems with the prices of actual  food such as a gallon of milk for $3.99

3)  Interview other people in the school for information and views.  The wandering students can take their mobile device, record the conversation, take a movie of something, or  take pictures.  ??????

4) Use data or capture specific  information from other parts of the school or community.  Social Studies students can take pictures of local history places, events or objects, interview community members for their memories, put together a wiki page for that place, and create QR codes to show how that place played a critical role  in the development of the place.  They put an actual QR code in front of the historical place.

5) Access in-depth information on a topic from other students and people.  Music students may create online surveys of what type music people listen to and how often. They can ask the survey takers to explain their choice of music and, then the students analyze the data.

6) Interact with people from other parts of the state, country, and world.  Students can use relatives and friends to find people other locations. For example, a student from Rochester NY may interact with a student from Quito, Ecuador regarding  celebrations to find similarities and differences.

7) See multiple views.  Since  each student in a small group can each access information (music, pictures, movies, text), students can see different views of the bigger picture and then create a synthesized view. In an English class, a group might focus on the human condition of romantic  love. One student finds a work of art, one finds a poem, one finds a song, and one finds a movie; they collaborate on showing different types of romantic love.

8)  Collaborate with   students and others  as part of their homework

9) Develop individual learning projects based on interest as well as group collaborative projects.  In Science students can explore a certain aspect of pollution (noise, chemical, in the air, etc) that interests them. They can develop their own hypothesis (school halls have more noise than an airport) and then gather data to prove it.

Mobile learning implies mobility of  physical place, mobility of expanding thinking, and mobility of interacting with others inside and outside the classroom, and mobility of individual work.

My Spanish spontaneous speaking activities (20+) includes Modified Speed Dating (Students ask  a question from a card), Structured Speaking (Students substitute in or select words to communicate),  Role Playing (Students talk as people in pictures or drawing) and Speaking Mats (Can talk using a wide variety of nouns, verbs and adjectives to express their ideas),  Spontaneous Speaking (based on visuals or topics),  and Grammar speaking games. Available for a nominal fee at Teacherspayteachers:  http://bit.ly/tpthtuttle

My three formative assessment books:   http://is.gd/tbook

Administrators Learn From Others Through Google Forms

Superintendents and other central office people often need to find out information, collect real time data, opinions or interests of others.  Likewise, a building principal might want to survey the views of his/her staff. He/She may be looking for alternative ways of solving a possible school problem.  When  administrators receive suggestions, opinions, etc from others and have up-to-the-minute data, they can make wiser decisions. An easy way to quickly get information from others is through Google Forms.

One just needs a Google email and then they can create a Google Form.

Go to Documents on the Google menu bar.

Click on New

Click on Form.

Type in  the title  of the form such as Hall Problem.

Add in any directions.

Select from several type of questions. Can use as many different types, each in a different question.  Those questions that allow for a specific answer (multiple choice  Checkboxes, Choose from a lists, scale, and grid) can  automatically analyze the number of responses for each choice. If you include numerical or very short answers, people can answer these from their Smartphone.
Text – short phrases or a short sentence
Paragraph – longer answers such as multiple sentences
Multiple Choice (select one of the answers)
Checkboxes (select one or more of the answers)
Choose from a list
Scale Rate something on a scale of 1-5 or 1-1o
Grid Rate a series of items on a scale of 1-5

Remember to click on “Makes  this a required question” if the survey takers have to answer the question.

Move any question up and down by clicking on it, holding down on it, and moving it up or down.

Click on Save.

Go to Forms, Edit and copy the url (http://..). at the bottom of the page.  Email that url to the people you want to take the survey or  take that long URL and shorten it using bit.ly so that people can type  it directly in their Smartphone or tablet.  Be specific about when the closing date is for taking the survey.

To see the results, go to Forms – Show Summary of responses.  The numerical answers will be a graph form. The text answers for any question will be grouped together.

For those  administrators that want real time  data at a meeting,  get the URL of the form, shorten it using bit.ly, and display that shortened URL at a meeting so the people can take the form right then on their Smartphones or tablets.  Show them the results instantly.

Are you ready to learn from others? Are you ready to make better decisions based on real-time information from others.

I have Spanish spontaneous speaking activities at Teacherspayteachers:  http://bit.ly/tpthtuttle

My formative assessment books:   http://is.gd/tbook

5 Formative Assessment and Technology Myths

Myth 1: The big computer assessment every three to five weeks is formative assessment. By three to five weeks, the students have learned and practiced the wrong way of thinking so that learning has become cement. When he assess on a daily or weekly basis, we catch learning gaps in the process and correct them.

Myth 2: The teacher uses technology to collect student work.  Yes, the teachers can use many web 2.0 tools such as wiki, voki, Google Forms, Glogster etc but the teacher has to move from collecting the evidence to recording  the  student data. If a teacher does not collect and make decisions based on the recorded data, then the teacher does not do formative assessment. Without recorded data, the teacher cannot measure progress over time.

Myth 3: The teacher can use technology such as voki, audacity, Word to talk to the students after seeing the students’ work. The teacher needs to do more than talk, he/she needs to give the student a new strategy to improve. If the student is stuck, he /she needs a precise way to get unstuck.

Myth 4: More practice on Quia, Google Forms, Blackboard, etc. will improve the students’ learning.  Only when the students learn why they got the answer wrong and learn how to think differently will they get the right answer (way  of thinking). A “you are right/you are wrong” quiz program  does not help students to grow.

Myth 5: Once the teachers see the students’ work through technology, the learning is done.  Formative assessment requires re-assessing and giving different strategies until the student shows improvement to the desired level. Often the students’ technology project is a draft and not the final version of his/her learning.  The student takes many assessments until he/she shows the desired mastery.

Link to Tuttle’s Formative Assessment books

Harry Grover Tuttle's Three Formative Assessment Books

English Essays – Grade or Assess? Done or Keep on Improving?

Today I returned my English students first essay. In my formative assessment manner,  I carefully explained that I want them to improvement in their writing during the course and to do so, I had to identify what they have done well and what they need to improve. Í  reminded them that the rubric  checklist has a plus (+) for doing well, a question mark (?) for inconsistent  work, and negative (-) for needs improvement.  I marked 20+ items on their checklist.  I did not give them a grade like a B since the grade tells them nothing about what they did well or have to improve in.  I also explained that, for each student,  I have identified the three areas that will lead to the greatest improvement. I stressed that I expect to see improvement in those three areas on the next essay.  They copied these three improvement areas on an Essay Improvement sheet that they will hand in with their next essay.  I explained that I will provide new strategies for those  learning gaps demonstrated by the greatest number of students at the beginning of each class.   More ideas are in my Successful Student Writing Through Formative Assessment

How do you help your students  to continually  improve?

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Your Students, is available through Eye on Education.

Also, my  book,  Successful Student Writing Through Formative Assessment, is available through Eye on Education.

Class increase of 12 points over last semester

I give a pre-test and a post test in my Spanish course.  From the pre-test I can measure the students incoming knowledge.  From the post-test I measure their departing knowledge.   More importantly, I analyze the results of each unit test by the various categories on the test. If many students do poorly on a certain section, I reteach it.  The next semester I start out that particular point with  the reteaching material.  I also do many formative assessments so that I can give students new strategies to do better.  This semester my students did an average of 12 points better than last semester’s students.  I have analyzed the final to see the area in which they lost the most points – writing mini-compositions and have begun to figure out ways to help them. We will do more writing in class and on our class wiki. I will focus on the verb forms to tell a story such  as what I did last weekend. I will have them write out their weekend in a chronological order and make sure that they use a different verb in each sentence. We will do mini-writings over several class periods. For the final they do not need complicated sentences; they just need simple sentences that communicate different ideas.  My goal is to increase this coming semester’s average by 10 points over last semester.

By how much will you increase your class average  this coming year?

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Your Students, is available through Eye on Education.

Also, my  book,  Successful Student Writing Through Formative Assessment, is available through Eye on Education.

Continuous Assessment

The British have used the term continuous assessment or assessment for learning for many years.  I like the term continuous assessment since it implies that students are continually being monitored and given feedback to improve. Continuous assessment differs from the “unit” test or “every five week” tests that do not provide feedback directly to the students and that do not occur on a daily or weekly basis  in the classroom. Continuous assessment changes our approach to the classroom; we spend more time observing students for their learning progress and giving them new strategies rather  than “teaching”.  We measure our success by how successful the students are as they learn  the essential goals of our course. We know that students will improve throughout the year and we reward that growth instead of counting their early attempts (such as the first essay of the year) equally with their final achievements. Their grades represent continuous improvement.  Continuous assessment returns us to our initial reason for being teachers; our students show that they now have the profound learning in our subject that we wanted to share with them.

My new book,  Successful Student Writing Through Formative Assessment, is available through Eye on Education.

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Your Students, is available through Eye on Education.

Assessing Web 2.0 Projects Through Bloom And Time

I offer the following mini-assessment of any Web 2.0 project as a way to refocus our attention on student learning rather than the Web 2.0 tool.

Take the highest level of Bloom achieved during the project

1- Knowledge                                  2. Comprehension

3 – Application                               4. Analysis

5.5 Synthesis                                   5.5 Evaluation

and multiple it by the number of days in the project.

So, if Susan produces a Social Studies podcast that simply restates (Comprehension) information about George Washington after five days, her score is 2 (Comprehension) x 5 (days) or 10.

If Pablo produces a Social Studies podcast in which he goes through the problem solving steps that George Washington went through and evaluates his final solution (5.5) in two days, his score would be Evaluation (5.5) x 2 = 11

Based on this analysis, a two day project of higher level thinking rates a higher score than a longer project. Let’s focus on student learning!

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Students, is available through Eye-on-Education.

Formative Assessment and Successful Student Writing Through Formative Assessment by Harry Grover Tuttle

My book. Successful Student Writing Through Formative Assessment will be available from Eye-on-Education in the Fall.

Quality Learning in Education

Long ago when I began a new job, my superintendent suggested I go to TQM training which was being done via videoconferencing. I learned much and changed my department into one that applied TQM to increase our effectiveness while providing high quality service. Then the TQM movement was criticized for being too business like and it quietly disappeared from education.  Ironically, many of the TQM ideas and tools have been renamed into more “acceptable” terms such as “continuous quality improvement” (CQI) or “data driven”. The premise in TQM is that you identify the quality that you want and you constantly measure to see if you are obtaining that quality. If not, you change your actions to achieve that quality.  TQM builds in success structures (many graphic organizers came out of TQM).  Movements such as formative assessment can be seen as TQM applied to student success.

How have  you identify the quality of learning you want in your students? How do you build in success measures so that students reach that level of quality in their learning?

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Students, is available through Eye-on-Education.

Contractors – Summative and Formative Assessment

I had several contractors in to give me estimates for some changes to my house.  The first one measured the room and left.  The second one measured the room and then spent double that time in asking me questions about the room and the house. I went with the second one because he understood what I wanted and how that fit in with the rest of the house.

I see the first contractor as a summative assessment- get a number and leave.  The second contractor was formative. He had numbers but he needed to know what those numbers meant in terms of what I expected in terms of the room (the end goal) and in terms of the whole house (all the other data from the house). He gave me several suggestions for improvements (getting me from where I am to where I want to be) and let me select the one I felt was the most helpful.

Which type teaching contractor are you- summative or formative?

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Students, is available through Eye-on-Education.

Color Coded Rubrics For Formative Assessment

If your rubric has a limited number of concepts, you might consider using  color coding. As you assess student work, you use a certain color highlighter for each major concept in the rubric (for example, for writing, red for  thesis and topic sentences, yellow for evidence, green for details,  etc.)  When you see a strength, you use that color marker to put in a Plus(+) sign next to where you  highlight the actual strength  Likewise, you can put a minus (-) sign next to a learning gap such a sentence that is missing a  transition and indicate where the transition should be.  Since each color corresponds to your rubric, you do not have to write out the type of learning strength or gap.  You indicate the category by its color and then you can write a formative feedback comment more quickly.

A variation is to use a certain colored highlighter for above proficient (green), proficient (blue), developing yellow), and beginning (red)  levels in the student work. For example, if students write an introduction at the proficient level, you highlight it in blue. If their conclusion lacks a restatement of the thesis, does not include the categories of proof, , and does not have an extender, you highlight it in red.  Students can do a color scan of their papers to see their levels of proficiency.

Help your students to improve by adding  color to their work

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Students, is available through Eye-on-Education.

Teacher Portfolios- Real Student Success or Faked Success?

Individually, I talked  to two teachers who had to present teacher portfolios and had received back  comments on their portfolio.  One teacher had glowing feedback.  He told me how he had only put student material in the portfolio that demonstrated above proficient work. He explained that usually only one or two students in all of his classes had reached that level for each standard and so he included that  work.

The other teacher had put in student work at all levels of proficiency.  Her feedback focused on how she had to help students to be successful. She had included the percent of  students  at each level of proficiency; she had even included a graph for the proficiency rates on  the four major standards. She indicated some strategies she had tried and whether each strategy succeed or did not succeed with these students.

The administrators were looking for measures of the teachers’ success in helping students to learn. They did not discern the difference between  a staged or fake representation of success for a teacher and a teacher’s  full disclosure about classroom learning.

How can your teacher portfolio show your growing success in reaching more and more students?

My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Students, is available through Eye-on-Education.

10 Standards-Based Formative Feedback Techniques for Your Class

Part of the handout for the conference session

1. Verify the purpose.

2. Be specific in the feedback.

3. Limit it.

4. Use an exemplar.

5. Use a formative rubric.

6. Have peer feedback.

7. Have students develop their own feedback.

8. Inform the class of progress and ask for strategies

9. Put the resources on YouTube.

10. Build in multiple checkpoints.

11. Provide graphic scaffolding.
    

12. Your ideas?
    

For any one who is interested in implementing formative assessment in the classroom, my book,
Formative Assessment: Responding to Students is available through Eye-on-Education.

Paragraph Writing Ideas Pre-Assessment: Formative Assessment

I am starting my composition course with a self-assessment of the students’ ideas about writing. I ask them to list all the things that make a “good” paragraph.  They do  this individually on their own paper.  Then I ask them to draw a line after the last item.  Next they get in groups and each person reads their lists.  If they have the same item on the top of their list, they check it off. If they do not have the item and they think it is a good idea, then they write it under the line.

By looking at their papers, I begin to get an idea of what they  originally thought  about paragraph writing and what ideas they added.  This short in class activity (about 4 minutes) provides a good starting point for my understanding of their ideas about paragraph writing. It only takes me a few minutes to go through their papers.

I will keep their sheets to compare their actual paragraph writing against their ideas as soon as they do their first inclass writing.

How do you pre-assess the ability of your students so that you can modify future lessons?