Quick Assessments

Formative assessment is a powerful tool for teachers to use in the classroom. When teachers take short informal assessments scattered throughout the class period, the teacher can quickly see if there is a need for reteach. Integrating formative assessments during class time can be challenging because there is only one teacher and many students.

formative

To increase efficiency and to be able to conduct more formative assessments, Mary Cherry is using an app on the iPad call Socrative. As students are working independently on their math problems, they enter the answers on the iPad and cand do this at their own pace. These answers immediately show up on Ms. Cherry’s iPad. She can then quickly see which individual students are having problems or if most of the class is having a problem, she then stops and does a reteach of the concept. The sooner you correct misconceptions the better for the student.

A $40 Computer???

Students in Dr. Wivagg’s class have learned that technology doesn’t always have to be expensive.  Given a $40 Rasberry Pi computer, the students had to learn what to do with it.  Through exploration and trial and error the students were able to hook it up and use it to access the Internet and various programs.  The Raspberry Pi uses the free operating system Linux and runs only free programs such as Scratch.  In the picture below, Ella, Morgan, and Andy are researching how to use the Raspberry on their iPad.

raspberrypi

 

 

Science Kids Create Digital Posters

Students in Mrs. Darr’s science class used Board Builder, a digital poster creation tool to share what they have learned about waves.  Not only did the students write about what they knew, they drew illustrations to represent the types of waves and took pictures to provide examples.  See an example below.

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Board Builder is just one of the great features that is available to our students through the Discovery Education Science Techbook.

 

Map Movies

In sixth grade geography class, Ms. Rardon had students work in groups to learn about the different types of maps and what the advantages and disadvantages of each type are.  To show that students understood these concepts, they created videos using their iPads and the app Explain Everything.  Students had to find examples of the different types of maps, define them, and wrtie a script that teaches others about them.  Watch an example below.