Digital Blog Post #I- Chapter 4

The first topic I chose to write about in this blog is using technology for lesson planning. So far in this course, we've learned a lot about technologies specifically for student use. This relates to students because it directly helps them, but is more so directed to making teachers jobs easier. The Internet is home to many resources for supporting lesson development using the student learning objectives and Understanding by Design (UBD) approaches. There are hundreds of already-assembled lesson plans on almost every subject. This resource has the potential to save hours upon hours of teacher's time. By doing a simple search on google, I found hundreds of extremely in-depth lesson plans for secondary social studies on a huge variety of subjects. There are also a number of lesson plan templates online available for teachers to create their own lessons without the hassle of having to create the whole chart to go along with it. When I become a teacher, I'm sure there will be more advanced technology than this, but I intend to utilize these types of technologies in order to be the most time efficient that I can be.

The second topic I will address is assessing and evaluating students. As teachers plan and deliver lessons, they are simultaneously designing ways to assess what students are learning. There are three factors that strongly influence how teachers think about assessment. These three factors are personal experience, standardized testing, and teacher tests. Personal experiences deals with the fact that teachers tend to teach how they were taught and assess the way they were assessed. This creates an endless cycle, and it leads to many teachers not utilizing new technologies that will indefinitely help their students to learn. Standardized testing is a method of assessment used all over the country. The 2001 No Child Left Behind legislation led to the dramatic rise of standardized testing. Standardized testing is a huge enterprise in the United States. A testing industry watchdog group estimates that 100 million standardized tests are issued to students K-12 in the United States every year. This method of attention is gaining a lot of attention lately, and not necessarily good attention. Many people, including myself, believe that standardized testing is not a very fair or effective assessment method. Lastly, teacher tests. Tests for teachers really affect how teachers think about assessment. Most states require teachers to pass a test before they can earn their teaching license. Assessing students is a complicated business. Some educators believe that test assessments best determine what a student know or is able to do in an academic area, while some believe that performance assessments more truly measure student learning. It is of vital importance for new educators to utilize both test and performance assessments in order to most accurately measure student learning progress.
The third topic that I found to actually be the most interesting is creating student performance rubrics. Student performance establish known-in-advance criteria to assess student performance, describe in concrete terms what students need to do to meet those criteria, and allow students and teachers to discuss areas in which the best work has been done or improvement is needed. I've found that I tend to do my best work when given a rubric to go along with the assignment. I think this is because rubrics provide me with very clear instruction about what is expected from me to succeed. I'm the type of person who prefers very direct instructions for things rather than my own free reign on an assignment. For this very reason, I am a huge believer in grading rubrics, but making an assignment clear, in your own mind and in the minds of your students, is not as easy as it seems. The usefulness of a rubric lies in its concreteness and how criteria are explained to students. The whole purpose of a rubric is to provide students with an idea of what is amazing, good, poor, or unacceptable work is. Therefore, it is imperative that we as educators know first exactly what we want from students and then pass that information onto them.

Resources:
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.

 Morrison, T. (2015, November 1). Types of Assessments. Retrieved November 1, 2015.