Week 7

This week in class was all about assessment and productivity.  In my county, assessment is very heavily pressed- even at the elementary level.  Our students in 3-5 spend roughly a month worth of school every year on standardized tests- that does not even include their tests in class.  Our K-2 students still spend about 2 weeks worth of school a year on standardized tests.  Specials classes are no different either.  Every time we have a meeting at school, principals are asking for data for our classes and the tests to back it up.  Many of my students have test anxiety because of this- some even totally freeze up when going to take a test because of the fear of failure.  Because of this, I spend a lot of time doing informal assessments in class- and if they are being officially tested, we sometimes treat it just like any other class.  For example, last week, my third graders were practicing their skips and steps using solfege syllables.  We had a quiz on this topic but students had no idea they were being tested.

According to the reading, one of the most important components of assessment is feedback.  It should be corrective, timely, specific, and sometimes allow students to give the feedback.  I do agree with all of these statements- especially in a music classroom.  Feedback is incredibly important for young musicians to improve.  If they learn a skill, hand position, embouchure, or even posture wrong, it is that much harder to correct the skill later down the road.  If a teacher notices something during assessment (or even during class), it is imperative to have timely, corrective, and specific feedback.  It is also important for students to give feedback on their own performances/assessments.  I believe the best way for this to happen is by videotaping it and allowing them to see and critique it.  This allows for the student to see improvement and if they have reached the learning outcomes.  Students can then set goals for further improvement in certain skills.

The other main topic of discussion this week was professional productivity.  I use many different tools to do this- many of which I found most other students in my class use as well.  I consider these to be some of the more common examples of productivity that I think most are already using such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint (as well as their Apple equivalents), a digital calendar, digital audio/video recorders, programs such as Remind101, file sharing programs like DropBox, and the different components of Office365 like their calendars and OneDrive.  However, I think my favorite productivity tool I discovered for this school year is an app called TeacherKit.  Before this year, I would always have two oversized clipboards with all my seating chart/grade trackers for each school.

This held all of my lesson dates and what we did for every quarter as well as allowing me to track student grades, absences, and behaviors for each week.  The downfall though, was that every quarter I had to rewrite 36 classes and 1100 names on brand new sheets.  Most of my student’s names are too long to input into the computer without totally losing the format of the document.  It got to be too much to keep up with between two schools.  Upon discovering TeacherKit, I was able to do all of the above, as well as adding pictures for each of my students.  Now all of my information is in one place for all 36 classes and it automatically configures grades, absences, and behavior reports throughout the entire year.  In addition, I have the option to enter parent contact information and send emails to them at the touch of a button.  It has made things much more smooth this year only having to carry around an Ipad as opposed to two giant clipboards filled with papers. It also allows me to change seating charts whenever needed, allowing for better classroom management.

I have also spent a lot of time this week working on my Webquest, which I am proud to say, is completely finished- a little early!! Aliens and their Instruments Webquest

This was an enjoyable project.  The hardest part for me was coming up with a story to hook the students.  Some things that were suggested to incorporate such as a Google Forms quiz or creating their project with a word processor, I was unable to realistically do because I wrote my Webquest for 3^rd graders.  They are currently unable to even login to their school emails- much less fill navigate a quiz online, or create a table in Word.  Though their information would be recorded offline, I was still able to incorporate a Google Slides presentation into the site to display listening examples for each instrument embedded from Youtube.  I found this to be a much more efficient way to expose my students to listening examples as opposed to embedding them directly into the Webquest and taking up a lot of space.

Overall, I found this to be a great project- along with pretty much everything else we have done in this class.  Google Sites was easy to navigate after exploring the tutorials on Lynda.com,  and I think it allowed for my project to turn out very well.  Over the past 8 weeks, I have learned so much from this course, and honestly, I could not think of a better introduction into the grad program at UF.