Process & Products

The 10th grade teachers have a set meeting schedule as a Professional Learning Community (PLC) that was established over the summer with my urging. The original plan was to have the PLC meet all but one Wednesday a month. As the head of this PLC group, I spent the fall building rapport with the few new teachers to the school and seeing where everyone's comfort level was both with technology and with trying new ideas.

I set up a Google Drive folder for our PLC with all our shared resources, including agendas for meetings (such as this example from 2/13/19), contact lists for students and parents, and needed templates.

The goal at the start of the internship was to introduce the members of my PLC to the different platforms above in ways that would highlight the differences between them. I created or showed examples of formative assessments that highlighted how one could assess skills as well as content knowledge, understanding and application. I started to introduce these as warm-up activities during our January meetings without spending too much time worrying about how to create assessments, but rather to highlight some practical applications.

At the first PLC meeting in February we found out that our meeting schedule for the reminder of the year was going to be altered and instead of 6 meetings during the Internship period, we would only have 3. As the PLC meeting time could not be devoted solely to my internship process, I had to divide up our work time so that at the PLC meeting I could showcase someone's Formative Assessment, demonstrate another platform, but then move on to other grade level business. That meant the time put in to actually creating new formative assessments and analyzing the data would have to be done in one on one sessions. The fear is that this would reduce the number of teachers who would try out these platforms, but the upside would be that by working one on one, any teacher who did work with me would more confidently implement formative assessments on their own going forward. And possibly turn into a convert who would be a leader in their department moving forward.

After the demonstration of the first Formative above, one of the English teachers came to me with an idea for reviewing MLA format with her students while they were working on a research paper. We worked together the day before our PLC meeting on February 13th to prepare a task to workshop during our meeting.

Our next PLC meeting was not until March 20th because of our weeklong February Break, canceled meetings for SAT testing of Juniors, and time to get grades completed for Progress Reports. As the first two platforms I had introduced required a little more work on the teacher's part to set up an assessment, I wanted to highlight a more immediate platform that teacher's could utilize quickly in the classroom with very little set up or technical skill. While several teachers in our PLC group were familiar with Kahoot!, I wanted to introduce to them to a similar platform that I felt was more powerful for the high school level, Quizizz.

My other Science teacher on the team soon sent the team an email detailing how she had started using Quizizz and shared with us the results of a quiz and a follow up requiz effort. She also outlined how she used the data from the student report to identify a problem area that students were having, and put forward a corrective action of a youtube video on that specific topic.

A chance conversation at the copier with one of my World History teachers led to a discussion of a required essay assignment our students were working on, and his fear that students had not really started and were not going to be prepared to turn it in the following week. I offered to meet later on that week to see if we could use GoFormative to formatively assess where his students were in the essay writing process and what they still needed help with. We sat down a few days later and he laid out the assignment for me including all of the primary source documents that they had been reading in class. The assignment involved writing a persuasive essay that stated a claim about who was responsible for starting the Cold War, US or USSR, and providing evidence from the documents to support the claim. There was not a right or wrong claim to make, only a poorly argued claim. The teacher expressed that his students were struggling with where to start even though they had been working with the district provided graphic organizers that went with the documents and the essay prompt. Looking through the entire collection of district provided materials, we came across a student exemplar essay that could be used in class.

We decided that providing students with the introductory paragraph of the student exemplar essay in GoFormative could provide students with a sense of how to get started as well as offer opportunities to probe understanding.

I followed up the next week to see how implementation went as well as see the student results. The little bit of work some of us had done trying out GoFormative in our classes paid off in that about one third of the class had used it in one of our classes before and were able to help other students troubleshoot how to log on and get started. This alleviated most of the stress the teacher had about trying something new because he didn't feel alone in the classroom with unfamiliar technology. Mission Accomplished! More importantly, he felt that he got meaningful responses from students and that the process was beneficial to his students. The essay is not due until after the Spring Break period so there are no results to report about the essay quality.

April saw our only PLC meeting before the conclusion of my internship period canceled. This cancelation prevented us from going over the Flipgrid platform at all. While I had introduced it to the team early on in our process, and our Spanish teacher had begun to play around with the platform, without further time to go over the details of the platform with examples, no teacher has implemented this platform.

One of the things that I was going to cover at our final PLC meeting was the introduction of the website I created to collect all of our wisdom from trying out these various platforms. Now that mandatory PARCC testing has begun, we have lost access to all building laptops and our wifi signals have been restricted in different zones of the building so we will not be able to implement any of these technology based formative assessments for at least the next few weeks, past the internship deadline. The website as created however is very much a living document as it is based off of an easily editable Google Doc that can be expanded and changed over time. Each platform's subpage relies on direct links to help centers and blog pages to limit the amount of future updating needed.

It also became time to wrap up the internship work and survey my participants. I decided to solicit both student and teacher feedback on the platforms that we tried out as well as some other things that many teachers were already using in their classrooms. This information will be helpful not only for me to see what additional ways I could have better supported my teachers, but also to plan for grade level technology initiatives for next year. My fellow Science teacher and I teach all of the 10th grade students between us so we asked students to complete the survey at the beginning of class over a two day time span. Not all students had devices and several art departments were out on field trips, but we did achieve about a 50% response rate. The teachers response rate was higher with 5 of 8 teachers responding.

The student responses mirrored what I would have expected in terms of which of their classes were using the technology platforms based off of who I worked with and which teachers seemed the most responsive. Technology access issues in some parts of the building contributed to this as some teachers who wanted to increase their technology usage in class were stymied by wifi or projector issues. I decided to include a few platforms that some teachers were already using when soliciting feedback from students, namely EdPuzzle and Kahoot!. Students overwhelmingly preferred Kahoot!, but Quizzizz was the second favorite. When asked why, students responded for both platforms that they liked the competition and the game-like atmosphere. Going forward, I will continue to encourage teachers to use Quizizz over Kahoot! as I believe there are distinct advantages to Quizizz, not to mention that their privacy and protection of data concerning third party vendors is better.

The teacher responses revealed that no one tried Socrative or Flipgrid in their classes. Socrative's functions are largely covered by Quizizz which is easier to set up, and we did not have sufficient time to cover Flipgrid, so I did not find these results surprising.