Okay, I said it yesterday and I'm saying it again today. When starting with PDSA, choose one subject. If you can, make that one subject math.
Here's why. We have a fabulous tool for creating assessments that are aligned with NCSCOS and CCSS and grade themselves. It's Classscape.
I love this tool for math. For reading, not so much, but that's another post. :)
Classscape has a huge bank of test items, sorted by goal, for both regular and Extend 2 assessments. It's quick and easy to use. (Look on the side. I've put up a tutorial to guide you through making a quiz.)
It also keeps track of whether or not I've already used an item on another quiz.
I make my weekly math assessments this way. Most quizzes are 10-12 items, specific to what I'm teaching any given week. I create my quiz before I plan my instruction. Why? Now I know exactly what they'll be assessed on. Sometimes I'll create a quiz and realize that I'm trying to test too much. That tells me to scale back what I thought I might teach that week.
Best of all, Classscape quizzes grade themselves. You can set it so that the kids can instantly see how they did. The results are also immediately available to you.
On a typical Friday, we leave the cafeteria, drop off lunchboxes, pick up boards and markers, and head to the media center. The kids quiz there for around 25 minutes. Kids that are done work on First in Math. If there are a couple of stragglers or terminal slowpokes, I ditch them and go back to the room for a chess minilesson. Once they're playing, I've got time to get their results graphed for the 'S' part of PDSA.
Another reason I love the system is that it keeps track of both your class' and your individual students' progress. It's graphed all nice and neat. I can run them off right from the computer for data notebooks. I sent individual graphs home (with a key to what the objectives mean) when it was time to get EOG review rolling. It could have been used as evidence for promotion/retention had I had any kids go to review over a math EOG.
At very first in the year, the kids get weirded out by it. On the very first 'Study' session, when we looked at the results from their first quiz, 'We're not used to using Classscape'. was one of their deltas. Within a few weeks, though, they were very comfortable with it. Late in the second semester, I had to give them a pencil-and-paper quiz on something for which CS didn't have items (It might have been plotting points, which I thought would be wicked hard on a computer screen.) and the fact that it was on paper was one of their deltas at the end of that cycle...
My goals for today:
Here's why. We have a fabulous tool for creating assessments that are aligned with NCSCOS and CCSS and grade themselves. It's Classscape.
I love this tool for math. For reading, not so much, but that's another post. :)
Classscape has a huge bank of test items, sorted by goal, for both regular and Extend 2 assessments. It's quick and easy to use. (Look on the side. I've put up a tutorial to guide you through making a quiz.)
It also keeps track of whether or not I've already used an item on another quiz.
I make my weekly math assessments this way. Most quizzes are 10-12 items, specific to what I'm teaching any given week. I create my quiz before I plan my instruction. Why? Now I know exactly what they'll be assessed on. Sometimes I'll create a quiz and realize that I'm trying to test too much. That tells me to scale back what I thought I might teach that week.
Best of all, Classscape quizzes grade themselves. You can set it so that the kids can instantly see how they did. The results are also immediately available to you.
On a typical Friday, we leave the cafeteria, drop off lunchboxes, pick up boards and markers, and head to the media center. The kids quiz there for around 25 minutes. Kids that are done work on First in Math. If there are a couple of stragglers or terminal slowpokes, I ditch them and go back to the room for a chess minilesson. Once they're playing, I've got time to get their results graphed for the 'S' part of PDSA.
Another reason I love the system is that it keeps track of both your class' and your individual students' progress. It's graphed all nice and neat. I can run them off right from the computer for data notebooks. I sent individual graphs home (with a key to what the objectives mean) when it was time to get EOG review rolling. It could have been used as evidence for promotion/retention had I had any kids go to review over a math EOG.
At very first in the year, the kids get weirded out by it. On the very first 'Study' session, when we looked at the results from their first quiz, 'We're not used to using Classscape'. was one of their deltas. Within a few weeks, though, they were very comfortable with it. Late in the second semester, I had to give them a pencil-and-paper quiz on something for which CS didn't have items (It might have been plotting points, which I thought would be wicked hard on a computer screen.) and the fact that it was on paper was one of their deltas at the end of that cycle...
My goals for today:
- Check out Live Binder and Evernote. I'd like to be able to compile and share data so that it can follow kids to fifth grade and is accessible to parents.
- Think about how a web-based portfolio could be managed without me losing my mind and giving up.
- Figure out how I might use these sites to store stuff presented in class. Kind of like a summary of each day's work, including what's been on the document cam, flipcharts, etc. It would be way useful to kids who are absent. It could also be used for kids who need to see it again and for parents who don't understand what the heck we're asking the kids to do. (Can you say, 'lattice multiplication?")
- How can I pawn that work off on the kids - make it a job? - without me losing my mind and giving up.
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