Monthly Archives: November 2013

0

Friday Bulletin Board

|

Abbreviated version because I have a food hangover.

Move over Oregon Trail. Sim City is the new multi-dimmensional learning tool
For the past couple weeks, SimCity’s publishers have been encouraging educators to use SimCityEDU, the educational version of the wildly popular urban planning simulation game. The article goes into the benefits of having students build a city and learn about the relationships of the structures they put up. For example, taking down a power plant would reduce pollution, but eliminate jobs and force workers to move.

Not only does it aim to convey basic skills such as arithmetic, but an understanding of complex systems such as the economy, the environment and the relationships that tie them together.

Another benefit of the educational version of the game is that teachers can track student learning styles on the back-end dashboard to the game. The beauty of it all is that you get all these data points and insights while the students are having a good time.

Teaching students the speed of the internet 
To show her fifth grade class how fast the internet works, one teacher posted a photo of herself on Facebook. I saw this shared on Facebook a couple days ago and thought it was perfect for teachers with students on the cusp of hitting the web. All too often I see younger people posting terribly venemous stuff, compromising pictures, and generally things that can lose them a job. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t has reckless in my greener days so I’m sharing if this with you. Check out how many shares she got in 24 hours (with the help of the magical place that is the internet).

Start-ups: If you need to be familiar to be successful, then how are you going to make a substantial change? 
This one is for the entrepreneurs out there. This post basically talks about how if you want to make a significant change, in our case education, you have to be okay with not eating despite how hungry you are to be successful. This is because it’s easier to make something that people are already used to. If they recognize it, people already have in their head as a something they need. But since edtech companies like Gradeable are trying to improve the educational process, we put up with the belly rumblings. Any ed-tech entrepreneurs out there relate to this? Anyone disagree? Is there a happy medium between revolutionary thinking and staying popular?

0

Gradeable Gives Thanks for Teachers

|
Gradeable is thankful for teachers!

Gradeable is thankful for teachers!

With Thanksgiving coming up, I wanted to take a step back for a little teacher appreciation. I asked the Gradeable team why they were thankful for teachers to share with everyone. The responses they gave make it clear why Gradeable exists: This team cares about the educator’s role. So for that, this year, I am thankful to have found this team. Parul, Sheri, Kattie, and Mikaila have been inspiring to work alongside. They combine brains, humor, and hard work in a way that makes getting on a train to come to work in Boston something I actually look forward to.

Why are you thankful for teachers? Our answers are below. If you want to join the conversation, Tweet us @gradeable with the hashtag #TeacherThanks. Here is  our team’s #TeacherThanks:

“Teachers are our role models and guides in some pretty formative years, when we have no idea what we’re doing or going and need the right people around us.  They have an enormous task in handling so many little lives, being role models, and trying to steer all those little (or big) people along the path of learning.  They get a bad rap sometimes, especially lately, but I still can say with confidence that nearly every teacher I have ever met does their job for the love of their students.  They deserve every parent’s thank you and the right supports to do their job well.  And of course, that’s why we built Gradeable.”
—Parul Singh

“Teachers are charged with the enormous task of not only molding good students, but also good citizens. They care for other people’s children, encourage them, protect them, and listen to them. They are the champions of dreams and hopes, and the dissolvers of limitations and fears. Teachers see the potential of every mind, and can turn not only a day, but a life, around. Their work cannot be measured when the last bell rings, and the year is over, but when their students recall on them many years later and the lesson is still fresh. I have been lucky enough to have some wonderful educators who helped shape my future so positively, and that is why I’m thankful for teachers.”
—Mikaila Waters

“You know that kid in class who checking their phone while the teacher is explaining a concept, tunes in for the last couple points, then raises her hand and says, “wait, what?” That was me. I was the “wait, I don’t get it” kid in class. Now that I’m a little older and a little more aware, I am especially thankful for all the teachers who took a breath and patiently re-explained something to me. I’m eternally grateful for the teachers in my life to made it their livelihood to open my mind, which would have become a wasteland if left to my own devices. I am inspired by the teachers and people around me who dedicate themselves to making the world a better, open minded, curious place to be.”
—Bon Chan

“As a former teacher, I know how lonely it felt grading papers in my classroom running often until 8 p.m. or even standing in front of 30 (40, even 50) questioning eyes every day, thinking that I was all alone in this seemingly endless, uphill climb. These children’s lives and success are contingent on you, your time, your heart, your dedication and it’s often a lonely business that teachers selflessly and eagerly take on. But I am thankful for the large and burgeoning education technology community of bloggers, programs, and products ready to step in and ensure that teachers are not in fact alone – ever. There is a group of people that dedicated their lives, their heart, their time to ensuring teacher success so that they can simply do their jobs well and be happy.”
—Kattie Lam

“I am thankful for teachers who always supported me when I wanted to do more and pushed me when I wanted to give less. When I was in high school, my music teachers let me play five instruments in the bands and orchestras and also sing in the sing in the choir, and never told me I was a wacko.”
—Sheri Cheng

From our family to yours, we wish you a happy, safe, and relaxing Thanksgiving (and Hanukkah!)

 

1

Tom Brady Makes Formative Assessments Look Easy

|
Tom Brady makes formative assessments, do you?

Tom Brady makes formative assessments, do you?

A few weeks ago, Parul gave me a book called Driven by Data. It’s written by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, the founder of Uncommon Schools, and is basically a playbook on how to use data to drive teaching. Again, some of you may already be hailing data and some of you may be curious, intimidated, or scared. For me, this is new and fairly obvious, so I’ll teach it to the middle.

Uncommon Schools is a charter management organization with schools in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Uncommon Schools places a high priority on quantifying and analyzing data in the hopes that it will yield insights for better teaching.

Word bank

  • line of scrimmage – where the play starts
  • passing play – when the ball is thrown
  • receiver – offensive player to catches the ball
  • man coverage – each defender is responsible for covering one person
  • blitz – when extra defenders try to tackle the quarterback

On page 85 of the book, Bambrick-Santoyo explains formative assessments by comparing them to audibles in football. Babrizck Santoyo defines audibles as offensive “on-the-spot changes to the play based on what they read in the defense.” When Tom Brady steps up to the line of scrimmage, he is making quick checks on the other team’s coverage: Are they dropping defenders in anticipation of a passing play? Are they playing man coverage? Are more defenders lined up for a blitz?

Taking all these little things into account, Tom can override the existing plan and call an audible.  A less experienced quarterback would most likely go with the game plan discussed before the start of the game and wait until a timeout, half time, or to get off the field before making adjustments.

As the quarterback of the classroom, the teacher can make quick checks of what the students are doing and call their own audible—making adjustments when possible as the class is going on.

What are these checks, you ask? Well they can be anything from quizzes to thumbs up or thumbs down. If the chapter test is a summative assessment (that sums up learning), a quiz, exit ticket, or scanning the room for raised hands is a formative assessment (that forms the lesson).

Chances are, if you are reading a blog on educational technology, you are aware of these assessments. Though they sound simple, formative assessments, like anything else, requires planning to be effective. Like I said about exit tickets, come up with these assessments before the class starts and how you will make use of your responses. How will you challenge the students who can teach the lesson? How will you reteach to the students who didn’t understand? What about the middle of the pack? What’s the plan for making sure they get it without boring them?

Finally, here are some suggestions to make it exciting…

For those of you who watch the Pats game Sunday, you saw the Patriots dominate their half time formative assessments. Down 24-0 at halftime, Bill Belichick took the first half diagnosis and adjusted the game plan to win the game. Imagine if they didn’t take time to adjust? Our record would be 7-3 on the season and have to deal with how Peyton Manning is greater than Tom Brady. So thanks to formative assessments, we won a huge game in November.

Formative assessments are our game. Find out more at www.gradeable.com.
Related articles
0

EdVestors Education Headliners Breakfast

|

Last Tuesday, Kattie went to an Education Headliners Breakfast hosted by EdVestors, a philanthropic organization which identifies important practices and brands themselves as a catalyst for change. The Edvestors tagline is “Driving Change in Urban schools” and the breakfast they hosted was to discuss the landscape of edtech challenges of true edtech success in the boston community – specific to boston is the high and diverse ELL (English Language Learning) population.

The setting of the breakfast was informal and was for educators who are already experimenting with technology. The meat of the discussion was affirming what most of us know: Technology is here to stay and many are working to make it more efficient, more effective, more useful—something teachers can actually see themselves buying into and using. In addition, the panel identified the complexities of delivering effective instruction as an effect of increasing diversity in the district. Because of the high ELL population, the district isn’t prepared well enough to deliver an instruction to overcome both traditional education obstacles and technology integration.

The Q&A session was when they started speaking our language. Jordan Meranus, CEO of Ellevation memorably said that apps are supplemental.  His key message was that no piece of technology is going to teach your students algebra, but technology can help in other ways. Another takeaway was that to be effective, a whole school system has to buy in. Technology works best when administration supports the teachers and teachers can get students to engage.

Mary Skipper, Network Superintendent of Boston Public Schools, discussed another very important reality: interfacing between new solutions and the current system can be difficult. Not everyone likes change. Situations may arise where technology is chosen and purchased by stakeholders who are NOT the ones using that technology day-to-day.  It’s wildly frustrating for both parties when they don’t see eye-to-eye.

To those people, you have my empathy. I’ve helped install systems before for bosses who didn’t care about the employee experience. Their mentality was “just learn it.” But like I said, technology isn’t going anywhere and Kattie put it well:

Ed tech is not supposed to overturn the system and render teachers and traditional systems useless—there is tons of merit in the traditional system, but there holes that tech can mesh together. Someone described it to me as having cracks in a sidewalk and technology as the gel to puts it back together.

My overall takeaway is that there are gaps in the current structure. From the Gradeable point of view, teachers spend a lot of time grading, analyzing, and reporting that we can help with. The gap is the amount of work that needs grading and the time and energy that teachers have to do it. For those teachers, and others looking to fill gaps in the classrooms, they look to apps. The developers who can work to fulfill teachers’ needs will succeed. No app will succeed without there first being an actual, teacher-voiced need. There are definitely some bumps in the adoption process — especially when technology is implemented hastily or without having the right planning or people at the table — but we’re on the right track!
0

Friday Bulletin Board

|
Apples say, "We're ready for a great quarterback match up on Sunday! GO PATS!!!"

Apples say, “We’re ready for a great quarterback match up on Sunday! GO PATS!!! And we respect Peyton Manning, but he’s no Handsome #12!”

 

Report sheds light on who teaches with technology
The pew research center conducted a survey asking middle and secondary school teachers how they use technology. As no surprise, technology has become a central part of their every day lives. Technology is central in most of our lives these days whether we’d like to admit it or not. I picked this story because it’s a good, straight forward look at technology’s number (with an infographic, of course). Probably the most interesting is that teachers are more likely to have a laptop, computer, or e-reader than the general population. And most tellingly, teachers in lower income communities are having a hard time getting resources and support to bring technology into their classrooms.

9 iPhone projects
The teacher who put this together says that students don’t usually think of their devices as cameras or all the different things you can learn from photography. My favorite of her projects is the one that combines writing with pictures. For example they could make a “how-to” guide taking pictures of each of the steps. At it’s very core, photography forces you to look at something in a different angle, light, or composition. It gives you some perspective.

Protests in LA over $1 billion iPad rollout
We revisit LA this week. The school system is having trouble convincing everyone that iPads are a good idea. While the iPad director insists it’s about how teachers make use of their devices, and not the device itself, her message isn’t getting across very clearly. Protesters believe the plan is unsustainable and irresponsible. Their plan calls for the distribution of over 100,000 iPads over the spring semester. I mean, that’s a ton of iPads if you’re not secure in the game plan. What do you think? Is the big iPad budget justified? Or should more resources be applied to teacher support? While you think it over, check my favorite excerpt from the article…

The protest, organized by United Teachers Los Angeles, included protesters eating an iPad-shaped cake and 10 teachers and parents holding up the numerical digits of the $1-billion cost.

Focus in school shifting from collecting data to using it

Teachers easily tap into data about their students’ performance to adjust how they teach, and parents can log into networks to learn how their children are doing, according to a new report by the Data Quality Campaign

Things are happening! People are making effective use of all this data. Sometimes, when I harp about using data, it’s amazing to me that not everyone appreciates the power of analyzing data. Maybe it’s not idea for every situation. I wish Google didn’t know everything I was thinking, but in school? To help our young minds reach their potential? It’s a no brainer. I’m glad it’s made its way to the Huffington Post. Or HuffPo as we like to call it in the biz…

President John F. Kennedy: Remarks at Amherst College, October 26, 1963
In honor of JFK, I’m sharing one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever read. This excerpt of his speech honoring Robert Frost and the role of the artist is printed out in my room. That such a powerful political figure recognized the ups and downs and standards to which an artist holds him/herself reminds me of why I chose the artist’s path.

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

1

Gradeable is #PoweredByPizza

|
#PoweredByPizza: Domino's makes a pizzavestment in Gradeable

#PoweredByPizza: Domino’s makes a pizzavestment in Gradeable

“Hi there! I’d like to send you $500 in free pizza. This is not spam,” said no one ever.

That is until one fateful day when Gradeable got this mysterious email from a mysterious email address in Miami, FL. It obviously sounded too good to be true, but they weren’t looking for our credit card number, or to wire us $1 million. So we cautiously accepted, and gave them the address of our office. It sat in the back of our minds for a month, radio silence giving way to hilarious daydreams of mass pizza delivery. How is that possible? Who’s delivering it? Will there be bread sticks?

Then, suddenly last Friday, a box arrived. It was unassuming enough, in the form of a large “if it fits-it ships” container. Inside, however, was a beautiful thing: a cross between a pizza box and brief case (A brie-zza box! See what I did there?) painted silver, and detailed down to a faux combo lock. It came with a personal note to Gradeable, and—wait for it—a $500 gift card for late-night motivating, hard-work fueling pizza.

“Dear Gradeable,” it reads, “We believe in you. You are brave.” These are not the words you’d think an international pizza company would send to a small ed tech startup, but Domino’s is waking up to the powerful combination of a grassroots movement combined with social media. Instead of creating another commercial, billboard, or pamphlet, they’ve decided to give away their product to around 30 small companies around the country, asking only that we Tweet, Instagram, or post about our #poweredbypizza moments.

Domino’s, you and your genius marketing strategies — of course we’re going to talk about getting a massive amount of pizza! Their concentrated approach to education transformed a formerly distant corporation to one that is connected and relevant to their communities. These communities are comprised of a group of real people with real jobs, real struggles, and real motivation. Domino’s cares about the people, and people need energy to do amazing things. So, why not pizza?

Since Domino’s is giving back to the community that powers them, we’d like to give back to the community that powers us: you. We’ll be throwing a pizza party a pizza party for our Boston-area Gradeable teachers with all our pizza credit some time in December. More details to follow, so stay tuned!

—Mikaila

Related articles
 
0

Exit Tickets: Let’s Get Started

|
So you're on board with exit tickets, what now?

So you’re on board with exit tickets, what now?

Kattie: Remember those times my students got 0/10 questions right?

Sheri: Yes, and I thought I taught it right…but they didn’t get it.

Kattie: I kept asking myself why didn’t they get it? maybe it’s not why…

Sheri: I think it’s more about knowing why NOW rather than months later.

So you’re on board with exit tickets. You’re excited. You’re going to find out what your students know at the end of each class. You’re going to hold them accountable for each lesson. It’s going to revolutionize the way you teach and reteach your class. It’s going to be awesome, right?  So let’s get started.

Determine your end game

What do you want to know from your students? Maybe you put them into differentiated groups for the first time and want to know how well it worked. Or maybe it’s more straight forward like, “what are the steps of FOIL?”  Whatever it is, figure out your essential question is and teach to the ticket:

For example, if you’re assessing students’ ability to describe a character’s motivation using evidence from a story, make sure you teach what motivation means, how to determine it, and how to support it with evidence.

— Education Week TEACHER

Decide what you want to know

You want to come up with a way to assess your students’ learning. If you’re stuck, then there are plenty of ideas on the web. Plenty. Some of them are called closure activities.

Showtime

After you’ve got your question, you’ve got your students, and you’ve got 10 minutes left in class, it’s showtime. You can go for the “everyone take out a scrap piece of paper and do this problem on the board” or “write your answer on a post it note and stick it to the poster before you leave.”

Analysis

Afterwards, you’re probably sitting at your desk with a pile of slips in front of you, unless you’ve gone digital. You can either go the “got it”/”don’t got it” route of sorting it into two piles, with the respective names. You can even get crazy with using more in-depth categories like (can teach it, medium-high, medium-low, doesn’t get it at all) and pair students off the next day depending on their understanding level, also known as differentiation groups.

Going digital

Here at Gradeable, we recommend digitizing your results. Just take that pile of answers and scan those babies in. With tools like Gradeable, you can keep student answers on file in a digital portfolio, grade them anywhere, and even have them auto-graded. The digital portfolio is huge: it gives you the ability to compare results within a classroom, across the grade, and even from year to year.

Let it be your guide

Of the many benefits of exit tickets, my favorite is that it immediately guides better teaching. I read a great example over the weekend in the book Driven by Data: teaching without data is like not being able to see the score in a tight basketball game. You don’t know whether you should drive hard to the basket or milk the clock. Exit tickets help you find out what students don’t know and focus on that. Or you find out that they mastered something and move on, or even reward them with something interesting or exciting. Using this “good data” is checking that scoreboard.

Instead of giving out star stickers everyday, why not let students know where they stand?  You’ll know exactly what to teach and get the satisfaction of meeting your students exactly where they are to drive better learning.

Here’s what an exit ticket could look like on Gradeable…

exit ticket online

Like what you see? Join us at www.gradeable.com to get started. 

0

Friday Bulletin Board: The Exit Ticket Edition

|
Exit tickets: Do you know what your students know?

Exit tickets: Do you know what your students know?

This week’s bulletin board is brought to you by exit ticket enthusiasm. I’ve scoured the web for the best posts on our favorite formative assessments. Most of these take you through the what, why, how, and when of exit tickets so I’ve highlighted the best parts of them.

Start with the exit ticket

Teach What’s on the Ticket
It seems simple: If you want students to show mastery on the assessment, you have to teach them how to do what’s on the assessment. For example, if you’re assessing students’ ability to describe a character’s motivation using evidence from a story, make sure you teach what motivation means, how to determine it, and how to support it with evidence.

Exit tickets, or “Did the kids learn anything today?”

Question:

How did working in small groups help you learn and understand the vocabulary words?

Answers (with comments):

If I am working with friends, I don’t accomplish much; however, if I am working with non-friends I accomplish the work.

Is it really working together if you do the work and everyone copies from you?  (No, but the lazy kids all wrote that they liked working in a group.)

I don’t think this was helpful.  I felt that we got off task too easily, and one person would just shout out the answer before we got to do it first.  (Interesting, the rest of his group liked the competitiveness of yelling out the answer first.)

It helped me hear how other people think of the words and how they remember the words.  (Excellent – the sharing of mnemonic devices.)

Next time:

What did I learn?  The next time, I am going to assign groups.

Creative exit tickets

My favorite:

4. Postcards – Have students write a post card to an absent student explaining the key ideas presented  in the day’s lesson.

Exit tickets for accountability

They like the routine. They know exactly what to do. They know at the end of the day they’re going to be held accountable. It’s a really quick way for me to assess if students have learned the concept of the day.
—Abby Randall, science teacher

Dinovember

And finally, we have this week’s feel good link. One set of parents made their kids’ dinosaurs come to life for every day one November. They said that “in an age of iPads and Netflix, we don’t want our kids to lose their sense of wonder and imagination.”

Have a great weekend, everyone! I hope it’s wonderful and imaginative!

Related articles
0

Gradeable at Innovate NYC, Part 2

|
Gradeable at InnovateNYC, GapApp Challenge

Our Gradeable teachers, Miss Deprisco (left) and Miss Weiss (right) at the GapApp Challenge

Gradeable at InnovateNYC, GapApp Challenge

Mr. Tormey using Gradeable for exit tickets

Over the weekend, Mikaila revisited our team of Gradeable GapApp teachers in the New York school system for the Innovate NYC Schools initiative. Gradeable was selected as one of the ed tech startups to participate in the first ever #GapApp challenge. The contest proposed by the New York City department of education, challenging software developers to submit an application that “helps fill the gap in middle school students’ skills, interests and motivation.”

This challenge also ties into our teacher-driven design process. This means, while participating in an exclusive contest, we are also getting the best design feedback — directly from teachers. So yeah, we’re pretty excited about @InnovateNYCedu and the #GapApp Challenge.

When I sat down with Mikaila, she explained that she was using her time in NYC as solid experience for the development process. “Developers shouldn’t build in a vacuum,” she said. “We’re talking to real live teachers in NYC schools who are trying to integrate tech in their classrooms.”

Mikaila worked with two english teachers and two history teachers. The english teachers co-teach a class, so they need shared access across their accounts. These are the types of “use cases” that allows Mikaila to understand how Gradeable needs to work in different types of classroom environments.

Additionally, even in a small group of four teachers, Mikaila found a range of teaching styles, varying technology expertise, and differing approaches to creating assessments. For example, some teachers like to create their assessments from scratch while others used New York State templates. Learning about how different individuals intend to incorporate Gradeable into their classrooms plays a critical role in how we develop our product.

Similar to her last visit, she walked the teachers through the product; this time she focused on exit tickets and small, formative assessments. Mikaila learned about the types of data they need in classrooms since New York State and the New York public school system have new requirements. The teachers want to use the data Gradeable provides as artifacts to track learning development and to show improvement.

“I love the conversations that come out of interacting with our teachers: the different ways they’d like to integrate Gradeable into their classrooms, areas they see room for improvement, or new features they think would be useful.” Mikaila explained. “That’s how great products are formed.”

We value the insight we get from working with great teachers. Do you have a “use case” that you think we haven’t heard of? We’d love to hear it!

Related articles
2

Exit Tickets: What They Are and Why You Should Use Them

|
teaching strategies exit tickets

Did your students fill out their exit tickets today?

One of the biggest issues teachers have is understanding if their student’s get it or not. And one of the best ways to assess this is with a simple quiz, or exit tickets, at the end of each class. Before the bell rings at the end of class, students answer a prompt that can range from a specific question on the lesson (“Give an example of a simile.”) to simply asking what they didn’t understand (“What was the hardest part of the lesson?”). As you sort through these tickets, putting tickets into “got it” and “don’t got it” piles, you can target your lesson plan for the next class.

These end-of-class-prompts are called exit tickets, and they drive formative assessment. Exit tickets are a quick, low-risk, non-threatening way to check the learning pulse of your students at the end of each class. They are slips of paper, index cards, Post-Its, or maybe something cool I don’t even know about.

The next day in class, the exit-ticket-wielding teacher knows exactly what he/she needs to re-teach and to which students. With checkpoints like exit tickets, you are no longer broadcasting a lesson and relying on head-nods or glazed-over expressions to gauge whether or not what you said just stuck. You have actual, written or otherwise, trackable responses to your check-in questions.

By giving students a voice at the end of each lesson that drives how you teach the next day, teaching becomes an iterative, directed, more efficient process. If you know half your students don’t understand multiplying fractions the first day you teach it, then you can adjust for the next day before moving on. Instead of waiting until the chapter test to realize the gaps in understanding, exit tickets give you an idea of who needs extra attention now.

In addition to collecting a trove of actionable data, everyday exit tickets create routine and accountability for both teachers and students. As a student, knowing that I’d be asked a question at the end of class would motivate me to pay attention. And for educators, what’s more motivating than seeing your results in real-time? It becomes about learning just as much as it is about teaching.

Sometimes, I feel like I sound like a broken record: feedback, teachers not technology, more feedback, accurate assessments, feedback saved a cat from a burning building… But the world of feedback is vast. And we at Gradeable are taking it on in an innovative way from the ground level. We’ll be spending a little time on exit tickets over the next few weeks because it’s one of the great things that Gradeable facilitates. By digitizing exit tickets, students’ progress can be tracked in real-time, graded anywhere, analyzed for trends, and kept in a digital portfolio.

The real beauty of exit tickets is that they don’t have to be another thing to grade. They aren’t meant to be complex. Check out this blogger who put up a poster on the back of her door. Her students write their responses on Post-It notes and stick them on the poster before they leave for the day. They’re almost painless and we’ll have plenty of inspirations in our follow-up post.

Here’s what an exit ticket looks like on Gradeable…

exit ticket online

Like what you see? Get started at www.gradeable.com.

Related articles