Digital Blog Post # J

Chapter 11

While reading chapter 11 "Engaging students in Performance Assessment and reflective learning" I thought about how different all our students are and that you, as a teacher, have to be able to observe everyone of them and their progress in class work. Our VPK students are getting ready to enter Kindergarten and have to know letters and sounds, shapes and colors, sight words and positional words, beginning reading skills and counting to 100. Starting in December, every 3 months we have to do a VPK assessment with them where they hear simple questions and point to pictures, letters or words or have to remember sounds and definitions of objects.
Here is a video that I found that explains more details of the VPK Assessment

I don't like those kind of assessments very much because those questions are standardized and teachers tend to focus on and teach the contents of those assessment questions.
The whole VPK session gets focused on those questions and words in it and people forget that we work with creative curriculum and mostly hands on learning. Children should learn by doing, interest and stay focused by their natural curiosity and not by following questions in a test booklet. Thinking of this I refer to the opening text of the chapter where Tracy, the young teacher, lets her students build digital portfolios about what they have learned and uses this outcomes as a learning assessment. I agree that this is much better than a standardized test because it includes the students interest and is fun and engaging for the students to create. I found the article "Here's why we don't need standardized tests" by Greg Jouriles that talks about that standardized tests are not necessary and why.
Chapter 11

The book says that the building of digital portfolios affected Tracy and the students' growth as learners in two key ways: The first is self-reflection. The book describes it as an important skill for students at every grade level. I agree that students need to find out by themselves what they are able to do and what they need help on. The best way to do it is working independently on a specific topic to create a learning portfolio. I remember when I was in school, I had fun in creating my personal learning folder for a history class. Creativity and extra content in the learning folder earned a better grade. It was interesting to find out extra material and new information about the different topics and it was even more interesting when the Internet became more and more popular to use as an information source. The second key point the integration of digital tools enables self reflection that support learning. The book says that performance based portfolios are not the only way for teachers to involve students in learning assessments. It explains democratic teaching practice invites students to be active shapers of the learning environment from rule creating to presenting information to peers or evaluating their own success. We start integrating our young children in planning and rule creating so they can learn what rules are for and can be able to tell me about their interests in school.
     While reading the next section "The Role of Assessment in Teaching and Learning" I am thinking about how challenging and how much work it is to plan for the week so the students will learn effectively. The book talks about 3 elements of Assessment. The second point describes student assessment. It explains that as a teacher schools expect you to provide ongoing evaluations about the learning process of every single student throughout the year. Most schools expect to see report cards, test scores, family meetings and oral and written feedback and recommendations about a students progress. As a teacher, you need to be able to assess yourself too. The book states questions like, "What strategies work well, what did not?" Why did the approach work well on one student and did not on another?" What activities work best for which lesson? All those questions sound familiar and I have to ask them too and try to find answers. Just as we know , as teachers, we have to do everything we can to let a student succeed we need to know that we can only do so much. This means that we too, are only human beings and not miracle makers. There is students with weak points and students with strong points. We can support and work on weak points with all the help we offer and strengthen and outgrow the strong points with all the help we can give but we can not turn someone into a a genius from one day to another. There will always be students who need more work on success than others. I have a little 5 year old nephew who started learning and repeating long before he can even talk. He had all the support from home and a rich 24 hour learning environment and now at age 5, he is able to read and write. I see same age children every day who have trouble to remember the alphabet and just started counting. It is a matter of support from home and interest of the child to learn and be successful. Teachers are there to help and support. In our school, we create portfolios for the children and add their artworks, writing works and other fine motor material to that. I think, this is much more informative as the questions and pictures every 3 months in a booklet.
     As I am reading the next section "Digital Teaching Portfolios" I am thinking about how I went to my very first interview at a preschool. I had a few small experiences from a school who let me take over a small group and do little projects with them. I took pictures and descriptions from this small experiences and I brought them to the interview along with my resume and past other work experiences. It was nice to at least show some proof to the school that I already have worked in a small group of children. I like the idea of creating a digital portfolio. It is convenient to send just a link to it to schools of interest if possible instead of bringing a whole folder of many different papers to show. I like the idea that you can create a whole story about yourself and the experiences with children and teaching. In my past time of teaching I found out that it is fun to do small science experiments with children. This makes them use all their senses and work all together in a small group to see what happens to material if we do or add certain things to them or combine different material together. They can see the process of material changing in form or consistence. I like to use material like flour, baking soda, vinegar, salt or sugar to make activities from. They are in everyone's household and cheap to get. One of my teacher friends suggested to create a blog that describes activities using these kind of materials. She says she sees me very often using these things and started to like it. I always take pictures of my small group lessons and I might save and use them to build a blog soon. I like that idea and you never know if this might be useful later in time. Its really amazing how far technology is today. It makes it real easy for teachers to find effective learning procedures and students have much more fun and show more engagement to learn than just with papers and pencils.

Citations

Conley, Ashley(2014) VPK Assessment final project, retrieved from Youtube.com

Freitag, Julia(2015) Think, Create, Plan.... (Picture) retrieved from www.wordle.net

Jouriles, Greg(2014) Here is why we don't need standardized tests, retrieved from www.edweek.com

Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.