Feedback

I had the best time this week.  Well, let's be honest.  Monday and Tuesday were rough, but man, by Wednesday, I felt on a roll, making the magic happen. And then there's Friday where I overslept by two hours, but man I felt well rested!

We're at that point in the year where students can start demonstrating they are learning which gets me thinking: how am I going to give feedback to all 150 of my students? I mean, seriously!  I know feedback not attached to grades is powerful.  I know feedback is one of the best ways to improve student learning (duh!).  But what type of feedback is sustainable?   Sustainable implies I don't spend 12+hours at school each day to give them meaningful feedback.

Itechnology 

I understand that too often technology gets in the way of learning.  Sometimes teachers spend so much time trying to figure out how to use some piece of technology that they forget what the students should be learning.  My love of technology isn't regularly clouded with such cloudiness.  Technology represents an outstanding way to give feedback swiftly and more regularly.  Here are three different ways I used technology in my three courses to provide feedback to students. And, trust me, I didn't spend inordinate amounts of time prepping these things, but I am very up to speed on tools available to me and I am relentless when figuring them out.

9th Grade Intermediate Algebra

Seriously, look how adorable they are talking to each other about math!
Aren't they the best!

The two units we start the year with are review of concepts they have seen in 8th grade algebra.  I've been grappling with how to get them engaged and recognizing their common mistakes and misconceptions yet also learning to work together in pairs and teams.  Today we were working on simplifying expressions where students need to distribute a -1 to all the terms inside of the parentheses.  To get them talking about the math and working together, one student had a marker and one pulled up a "Unicorn Race" on Socrative.  The game had 10 questions with multiple choice answers (not ideal), but the goal was to accurately solve your problem and your unicorn would move across the screen.  If you were incorrect your unicorn would stay put.  It was the perfect mixture of competition and collaboration to get them talking about how to simplify the expressions.    What I found the most powerful was the learning that happened between the day of the Unicorn Race and when I asked the same question the next day, this time without the answer choices.

Here's the original question. When I posed the question on day two, I didn't reveal the answer choices.

The graph below shows the results on day one when they worked with a partner.

As you can see, over half of the students selected the same wrong answer on day one.  But the next day, in a quick show of hands and after visually scanning student's papers, ALL of my students got it right.  I mean c'mon!  How awesome is that!  We celebrated and moved on to good old pencil and paper for our next concept of solving equations with distributive property. 

If you aren't familiar with Socrative.com, it is worth your while.  It has four options for creating your own assessments, you can share them with colleagues and get spreadsheets and item analyses of the results.  The interface is very user friendly and it is quick to get your students to the site and enrolled in your class for an assessment.  Next on the list to explore feedback in this class: PLICKERS!  

Algebra 2 and the Google Add-On AutoCrat

As I investigate ways to give students feedback on their homework without grading each homework, this week I gave a Homework Check on google forms.  This worked well because the questions were around evaluating functions and describing a domain.  I asked three simple questions from their homework a few nights prior.  I can't say they did very well on the problems, but the goal was to give them feedback on their learning meaning the assessment was formative.

There are some strong misconceptions formed when our high school went to gradebooks that were required to have 80% of grade be Summative Assessments (commonly thought of as tests and quizzes) and 20% of the grade be Formative Assessments (commonly thought of as homework, classwork).  Many people assumed that meant the Formative was less important since it represents less in the gradebook.  I cannot stress enough that formative only equals 20% because we are bound to make mistakes when we are learning something.  Formative assessments aren't worth less, they represent less in our gradebooks because we don't want to penalize students for not knowing something early on in the learning.  Instead their grade will represent what they know and can do once a summative assessment appears.  If I had it my way, the grade would be 100% Summative and we would find a way to get students to do the daily work (formative work) necessary to be successful on the summative rather than enticing them with points in a gradebook.  

OK. Rant over.

Back to the homework check.  I asked three questions and the spreadsheet looked like this after students submitted their solutions:

Conditional formatting is one of my favorite quick tools.  I set it up to automatically highlight many of the correct answers so I could do a quick scan and see how students were doing with the concepts. This gives me, as the teacher a pulse on the class.  I now know in general how well the students understand the concepts.  

But, formative assessment shouldn't stop at the teachers.  Using the google add-on Autocrat, I sent the results back to the students in a google document.  The document populates itself with the students' responses and had the correct answers already written up.  Each student received an email and they were instructed to reflect on how they did.  Here is a sample of the student work:

Bam!  Student Self Reflection sheet created with the click of a few buttons!

The documents also organize themselves into a folder in my google drive account so I can follow up and leave additional comments for students if necessary.  

I can't stress enough how easy this all was.  Yes, I am good at technology and I persisted even when the documents didn't send out the first time, but after getting over those initial bumps, the benefits far outweigh the little bits of extra work and headaches encountered.

Probability and Statistics and Google Classroom

Google Apps for Education is, perhaps, my favorite little piece of amazingness that has rocked my teaching world.  I'm not talking about the fact that it rocked my world when it began and I've been in love ever since.  I'm saying it rocks my teaching world regularly.  Most recently, I have fallen in love with Google Classroom.  What a phenomenal tool that I cannot begin to imagine what it will become.  I've been using this tool extensively in my Probability and Statistics course.  As a first period class with mostly seniors, we had our first Hybrid day on Thursday.  Students were able to log into their google classroom, see the assignment and begin the work.  On Thursday morning, I peaked at my google drive folder with the assignments and could see who had started the assignment:

Because, you know, google is awesome like that, I can see all the assignments I've assigned in a nice little folder.  Anyone that knows me knows that I am a scatter brain.  In fact, I think my close family wonders how I successfully create lessons each day without forgetting something.  Google Classroom is making my organization so peaceful and painless.  All I have to do is create the learning opportunities and Google Classroom keeps it all in order.  Thank you google.  From the bottom of my heart, for being so darn amazing and making FREE tools for education that simplify our lives and let us focus on the learning and the teaching.