Mr. Hamada’s Universe

At some point, I was recounting our in-house PD session with Jeff Utecht, inspired by my time at Learning 2.008. Day 1 (in my opinion, at least) was all about our TabletPCs and what we could do with them. (Day 2 was more about Web 2.0 and bringing that power into our classrooms, but I’m getting ahead of myself.)

My second workshop focused on my experiences using the TabletPC, combined with Cam Studio, to create screencast movies. My goals were twofold: 1) to teach others how to set up Cam Studio (for some reason, this wasn’t/isn’t part of the standard ghost image) and 2) to give teachers of all disciplines a concrete example of how and why they can use these screencasts as authentic assessment, both in the formative and summative sense of the term.

Even with the predictable technical glitches, the session went well. In the ultimate measure of success, I’ve had a few teachers coming to me for questions after the PD days, so I guess that’s something!

Here’s an example of a screencast that I’ve made to help my students:

And here’s an example of a screencast that some of my grade 8s made last year in Korean:

Ultimately, I’m trying to get my students create and upload screencasts to a wiki so that all students can use these as revision resources. I don’t want it to be about assessment or other extrinsic motivations to create and post. But I need to promote the power of the community first. I’m not sure how to do that, though…

Photo Credit: Through a Child’s Eyes by Ray Lopez

Powered by ScribeFire.

Since Dan has linked to a bunch of readers who have implemented skills based assessment derived from his model, I thought I better post my own experiences with this.

I used this in my grade 8 math class (integrated concepts, heterogeneous grouping) as a way to revise the algebra that they had already been exposed to, with an eye towards needs-based differentiation. I divvied the algebra units from grade 7 and 8 into 25 skills, 5 of which I would consider ‘extension’. (Resources at the end.)

How it worked:

• I handed out a sheet that listed the 25 skills and asked the students to self-evaluate their abilities, based on their performance on homework and tests if possible, using a 3 band rubric: sad face – not sure of what to do or how to do it; blah face – can do it sometimes but with minor mistakes; happy face – anytime, anyplace, bring it.
• Once a week (usually on a Monday, based on our homework rotation) students would be given a 25 question quiz, with each question was aligned to the corresponding skill. The students had 20 minutes to complete as many questions they wanted. Each question usually had two or more problems: one simpler, one more complex.
• I would then give the students 40 minutes to review any topic that they wanted using any method available to them: practice worksheets in small groups, one-to-one or small group help with me, using web resources that I had already searched out, or viewing screencast movies created by me or my teaching partner for that particular skill.
• I would grade the quizzes on a 3 point scale, corresponding to the different faces and return the work within a day or two.
• The goal was to receive two happy faces (show skill mastery twice) in order to receive a ‘gold cup’ for that skill. Students kept track of their own results on their skills sheets but I only asked them to record progress.
• I kept track of all results in my gradebook.

After a couple of weeks, some of the students pointed out the obvious: why not review at the beginning of the lesson and then complete the assessment at the end? Much better…

This went on for 10 weeks, excluding the brief hiatus in the middle so that we could complete some in-class projects. All in all, I’m quite happy with the outcome of this little experiment and will definitely include it next year.

The Good:

• Reinforced discrete algebra skills on a weekly basis, something we couldn’t always do in our integrated setting.
• Students seemed to enjoy it and liked the simple 3-band rubric.
• Many students showed significant growth and improvement over the 10 weeks.
• Teachers in grade 9 will have a way of checking the entry level of students by looking over their skill sheet.

The Bad:

• Time in class needs to be more structured – at times it felt like a free-for-all where little was being accomplished.
• Students kept working on skills that they had already shown mastery in. This is a fundamental change in assessment and learning for them and that needs to be stressed. They didn’t really like the idea of skipping questions at the beginning (what does that say about how they’ve been trained???).
• It got a bit repetitive for the students. More variation in the materials would be nice. These can be added throughout the process in the future.

The Unknown:

• Will this actually have an effect in the grade 9 classroom? I’ll find out since I’m one of the grade 9 teachers…
• The idea was to have students who showed mastery in all skills act as student leaders as well as create their own screencast movies for skills of their choice. Only a couple of students actually got that far, however. As tablets become more pervasive in the school, I hope it will be easier to get the students creating content that can help their peers.

Resources:

algebra-skills-list

algebra-skills-test-1 – Apologies: some of the characters have magically changed, but you get the idea I hope.

A sample math screencast: Graphing in Standard Form

A sample student screencast: FOIL in Korean