Creating Time-Efficient PAT Preparation:

Practicality:

When I decided that I wanted to do a Digital Escape Room with my students, I Googled how to create one, because I had heard of teachers using them before (sadly, I cannot take credit for the idea). The tutorials I found online required several steps to complete, especially because my students use Microsoft Teams instead of Google Classroom. While these activities probably turned out beautiful, I wanted to ensure that I was spending my time focusing on the actual instruction and learning material I was providing for my students; I did not want to download 3 different softwares in order to create an activity that would take my students less than a class to complete. While it would have been faster to create a quiz or a worksheet for my students, the value of student interaction with the literature was worth it.

Manageability:

According to Naylor & White, in a study of teachers in British Columbia and supported by the Canadian Federation of Teachers, "teachers work 10 to 20 hours per week outside of regular school hours" (2010, pp. 11-12). There are many tasks that take up teachers time outside of regular working hours: marking, especially in English Language Arts; creating and implementing lesson plans; printing; and, obviously, designing classroom activities. Admittedly, the first Digital Escape Room that I created took me several hours over Thanksgiving weekend to complete. However, once I had figured out how to create the PowerPoint and what I wanted it to look like, the actual creation of the activity was relatively quick. The biggest time-consumer when designing the Escape Room was creating the reading comprehension questions, which would be the same if I were to create a quiz or worksheet for my students.

Accountability:

Teachers, as a collective, deal with a high level of stress related to the standardization of assessment: "[t]he current emphasis on high-stakes testing and accountability increases the amount of time that teachers spend on paperwork, administration, and formal student assessment and reporting" (Froese-Germain, 2014, p. 2). Implementing Digital Escape Rooms as formative preparation for such high-stakes testing removes some of the paperwork of teacher work and moves it into a more interactive realm. Moreover, the use of Google Forms makes assessing the validity of test questions easily accessible; when a Google form is submitted, the creator can see when a student selects a the right or wrong answer without the student knowing, and the creator can also see how many students select each answer. If the correct answer is A, but all students are selecting B, I can take this as feedback for myself and reword the question to ensure that it is fair. It can also help distinguish between recollection questions and higher-order questions.