I enjoyed this unit and the thinking it required of me regarding formative and summative assessment. I have discussion questions embedded into my online seminars but didn't really think about them as assessments. This unit has given me the opportunity to look at those discussion items differently and consider how important they are that I give feedback and encourage feedback from their peers.
The other thing I appreciated about this unit was the opportunity to think about how to integrate a variety of web 2.0 tools into a formative assessment practices. I tried to include several types of tools that I could use to help my students understand the content. Where I believe I still struggle is trying to finding ways to vary how they receive feedback.
As for challenges, I see many of them that are the same as in any brick and mortar classroom. Often as teachers we are caught up in the delivery of your content and we fail to remember that we need to provide students time to process, talk it out with another and digest the content before moving on to other things. With the desire to make sure we use every moment for great teaching we need to remember that we need to let students assess each other and we need to also comment and be part of the discussion to help students understand the content. I see the on line/blended learning teacher naturally being more of a facilitator of learning vs the sage on the stage because of the need to provide feedback without seeing your students face-to-face.
Teachers do tend to not give enough process time. For about a decade, most teachers have been held accountable to a pacing guide, which made us all focus on moving forward, without making sure that the learning was happening.
ReplyDelete