Internship Key Concepts

The goal of my Internship experience was to increase the amount of formative assessing in my own classroom and that of my grade level peers, as well as use that information to inform instruction. During the Internship time period, my different courses were in very different spots in the curriculum. I decided to use Socrative primarily with my Honors Chemistry classes because it allowed me the opportunity to embed the reteaching into the questions themselves for the skills based material that I was covering.

My colleagues in English and History preferred the more open format of GoFormative to solicit ideas from all students in a way that was not just yelling out answers or dominating a discussion, and then using that information to guide where class discussions needed to go. My History colleague found this to be extremely helpful in helping students with the writing process as his teaching skill set is more content based and less writing focused, and GoFormative allowed him to see areas where students were struggling without needing to turn in an entire rough draft of a paper.

As preparation work for my Internship, I performed an analysis of my school's readiness and willingness to make changes to our technology usage as a part of my Technology Planning Paper. My original analysis included Roger's Perceived Attributes, Ely's 8 Conditions of Change, and looking at the 5 stages of the ACOT model. While this analysis was performed over the summer before my Internship was even set to begin, I had no change in my administrative leadership after the analysis was complete, and two thirds of my grade level teaching cohort remained the same. I took the fall to get to know the few new members of the grade level team, but their relative newness to the school community and teaching made them fairly willing partners in my Internship project idea. These new teachers introduced no new barriers to implementing an increase in technology usage in our grade level and for the most part were a direct replacement at the Adoption or Adaptation stage of ACOT for the prior teachers in my original analysis. The largest barriers to any implementation of technology at my school continues to be structural issues around scheduling access to the resources we do have, coordinating initiatives around the ever expanding online testing regime our school district, and the time required to train staff beyond the simple how to use a platform stage.

I began my planning process for the Technology Planning paper and ultimately my Internship project with a brainstorming session with my Principal. I presented a range of options of things we could try and we discussed what could have the most impact but in a way that was immediately possible with current equipment and staffing. We agreed that increasing the amount of formative assessments being done in the classroom was an instructional goal for her that I could facilitate the increase of by using technology, and thus made that the goal of my approved Internship Proposal. While she initially wanted to have the whole school involved, I convinced her that this would not be the most efficient way to implement the idea and proposed working with just the 10th grade teachers initially with the plan to include more staff in the following year. As a 10th grade team we have worked primarily with three different platforms for completing formative assessments and want to make a plan going forward for streamlining what we do commonly in our classrooms. In addition, I have been asked to provide some sessions at the beginning of next school year for the whole staff on how to use some of these same technologies to create and use formative assessments with students.

This teacher came up with the idea of using multiple iterations of the same quizizz in a competitive way to improve their understanding. She provided an example from her Immune System unit where she used a quizizz that she wrote an initial time and then after giving them time to look up information they were unsure about, had them repeat it to improve their score. Since this initial endeavor, she has repeated this process, mostly with pre-made quizizzes in all three courses she teaches.

GoFormative has taken a little bit more time to get up and working with teachers as it is best done on laptops which are not always easy to come by during this testing season time of year. The two teachers who have worked with it the most both needed one on one time to fully troubleshoot the platform and the larger lesson around the usage of the formative assessment. My History teacher was most interested in using it after my example map quiz, but ended up first using it to aid in the district mandated writing assignment which his students were struggling to get started on. We spent an afternoon creating his formative assessment, testing it out with his technology, securing laptops for usage, performing a test run which found some things to improve, and then sketching out a lesson plan for him to follow the following Monday in class. He was pleased with the results and wants to continue to use the platform once the testing season is over and laptops are available again.

As a part of my internship process, I created a website that provided information about the different technology platforms for creating formative assessments we used as well as some others that teachers might decide to use on their own. I included the results of our initial brainstorming sessions and trial and error period to help current and future teachers quickly find a platform that might fit what they have in mind. Each technology platform had its own subpage that linked directly to the help or how-to portion of the platform's website. I also included instructions on how to create accounts, what the advantages and disadvantages are for free versus premium accounts when those existed, and information on ways to broadcast assignment information to our students. By primarily using the technology platform's own help page, I hope to reduce the amount of updating that this page will need in the future as we look to start a new school year.