Effective Assessment

What is effective assessment? How is effective assessment related to teaching and learning?

Effective assessment is, in basic terms, something that gives feedback to both the student and the teacher.

For the student they can be gaining important feedback through both summative and formative assessment. For this assessment to be effective it needs to inform the student, whether it is positive or negative feedback. The same can be said for the teacher, the feedback they get from assessment is what will help them decide if they need to regroup, move on or change their teaching method.

For teachers constantly assessing their students can help lead to a successful classroom as students will be taught the content that needs to be worked on and students will not be rushed forward into new content. If they were to be rushed forward there could be a massive snowball effect that can leave the student farther and farther behind as the school year moves on. Effective assessment can stop this scenario from occurring in the classroom.

Basically effective assessment is the use of summative and formative assessment strategies in the classroom to benefit the students learning as they move forward. Effective assessment is nothing special it is just the proper use of assessment, misuse of assessment is still assessment but it is misguided and not nearly as valuable.

Describe how evaluation fits into your philosophy of teaching Business Education?

How does effecting assessment and evaluation fit into my philosophy? Well I simply want to have successful students. This might sound extremely idealistic but I want to have students leave my class knowing they learned something and that they actually learned it. I don’t want some fluff in my class that the students remember for an exam and then forget it 30 seconds after the final exam or project. To clarify, when I say successful I don’t even mean I want every student to have 100% in my class (although it would be cool). I want students to know the concepts that are taught. Perhaps it is the wrong attitude but I am not worried that they know all the finite details; I want them to know the big picture. I want my students to be able to take something they learned in my class and know what it is in the grand scheme of things. This is why assessment is important, if I don’t know if the students know what it is I want them to know then I am not only failing myself but I am failing the students as well.

Good thing I keep promises!

So as I promissed in...umm...August I am going to try and keep this blog up regularly. I intend on posting on here regularly from now until April and hopefully longer. Look for my newest post to be posted in the next hour!

It has been a while

Wow, time has flown by over the past 2 1/2 months. Sorry for not posting anything, I fully intend on keeping this blog up to date I have just been way busier than I thought I would have been over this time.

Alan November Podcast

In class today we watch a podcast of Alan November where he talks about how schools and teachers are taking the technology out of the classroom because they are afraid. Within the discussion in class we talked about how teachers and schools and banning this and banning that in an attempt to maintain control over the learning of the students. Alan November talks about exactly what I think is the solution: Teachers need to stay on top of the emerging technology. Join Facebook, join Myspace, buy an ipod, get a cell phone. Why ban all these technologies instead of embracing them? Use them. They are not going anywhere, in fact there are more and more of them all day. Moore's law in regards to microchips is that they will double every year, imagine that for a second. DOUBLE. That means all the technology we have today will be double come next year. Why would we as educators want to limit this? I personally think it is mainly that teachers did not have to change as rapidly before and now are not willing to change any more than they want. These teachers want to be the dictators, when in reality it is the students who are the dictators.

PS...Allan if you are reading this I would reward your son, just make sure he understands why.

How has Information Changed

Responding to David Warlick http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2007/06/13/how-has-information-changed/

Mr. Warlick starts off his blog by explaining how information is networked in todays age and how it has changed dramatically from the days when you had to find a book in your house or go to the library to research a topic. Now you can simply log on to the internet and have access to anything you desire. This really is amazing, and true. Consider Wikipedia, you go to look up any subject and other topics that are related to that topic are linked withing the document. This means that you can go and view something on Computers and read up on Apple Inc. and within one click read a biography on Steve Jobs. Whereas in a library you would have to find the section for Biographies, find the section for Steve Jobs and hope it is in the library at the time. Wikipedia really is amazing for its networked data. Try playing "Seven Degrees to Kevin Bacon" on Wikipedia :D.

Mr. Warlick goes on to talk about how this information is becoming increasingly digital. I can't argue with that and I feel that with children also becoming more adapt to digital "things" that educators need to embrace these digital "things". Mr. Warlick talks about how this digitization allows us to search quickly and effectively for the information we want and desire. Used properly this can only lead to good things in my opinion. However that is a big if and leads me to remind my self of the mapping concepts I have learned in my Ecmp 355 class.

Because of this networking of informations classrooms are also becoming networked within the information, through blogs, wikis or any other type of information. Schools are now connected to the outside world as compared to before this change in information when schools were only connected as much as the information within the school would allow them to be.