Student-generated Assessments Using Google Forms and Scratch

     Last school year was my first year of teaching third grade after teaching first grade for 11 years.  Let's just say that there are not many similarities to teaching emergent readers and readers in the intermediate grades.   I admittedly was a little unsure about how guided reading works in third grade when I first started.  Now that I am fully immersed in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), I am very aware of what skills and strategies I should be imparting and I am learning every day how to accomplish this feat.
     As a teacher interested in educational research, I have been looking at books and articles dealing with motivation.  No matter what grade I teach, there are always reluctant readers and I am striving to find out how I can motivate them to take risks and develop an interest in reading.  As I incorporate technology into my classroom, I notice how interested some students get in my lessons, and in particular some of the reluctant readers mentioned previously.
     The way I look at it, incorporating technology can allow a chance for innovative thinking, ownership of the work, and above all choices.  Students love choices!
     So when six of my third-grade boys were done reading The Most Beautiful Place in the World by Ann Cameron, I asked them what are they going to do now that they have read this book? Some other students wrote a commercial for why you should read The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes (see video here), so what were they going to do now that they completed the book.  Some decided to make a "test" of the book using Scratch and the other group decided to make a multiple choice test using Google Forms.  This "project" was a great window into the minds of my students and how they understand and perceive assessment.  Future lessons in book clubs later focused on moving beyond asking and answering questions that can be found explicitly in the text (CCSS RL.3.1).
     The first group that read The Most Beautiful Place in the World wanted to make a test using Scratch.  We have some avid coders in the class and they jump at any opportunity to use Scratch. They had to figure out how people would respond. The test (available on the class website) was the stepping stone for future "tests" and really illustrated the progression of learning and problem-solving. Later on, one of the students shown below made a test about our research on China.  He used a different format and other students collaborated to figure out how to program in the progression of points.

    The second group that read The Most Beautiful Place in the World started their final project by writing questions in their reading notebooks. Next, they wrote incorrect answers that may trick their test takers with distractors.  Once this was accomplished, I gave them a quick tutorial on using Google forms and they went to work creating their online assessment.

    The multiple choice group had to come up with the post on the class blog letting others know their test is available.  Now do we have any takers to read the book and take the test?


    These experiences later influenced how the class ended our online research of China.  Seeing the level of motivation, collaboration, and focus that these students demonstrated had me rethinking how the class' knowledge would be assessed.  Stay tuned to find out the results of my next experiment.

Feeling Unnecessary is Great!

    If you looked around the week before last (we are on Spring Break), you may have noticed that I was walking around the room feeling a little unnecessary.  In any other context, that may have been a moment when I questioned my abilities and felt lonely.  In this case, I felt reaffirmed as a teacher.

   What am I talking about? Well I will fill you in.

    All year I have been introducing various websites and apps for my students to use to complete assignments.  Now that we are towards the end of the school year, I am reaping the benefits.  Some people demonize the use of technology. They say that kids are no longer playing or engaging with others. Although that may be the case in a majority of cases, this is not the case for students that have been guided towards using technology to further their creativity and learning.


    We are finishing up a unit on China where we studied China's economy, culture, geography, climate, and government.  Students watched movies and wrote notes in Google Docs where they categorized information and compared urban vs. rural life.  Previous research units on Crayfish and the USA involved mostly print texts but the China unit involved the new literacies of online reading comprehension. Students were responsible for finding information in a scavenger hunt format utilizing a teacher-made website made years ago, a Livebinder page, a Google custom search engine, open Google searching, and videos.

Next, I asked the class to come up with ways to showcase their understanding of China. They came up with various ideas that included created a movie, newspaper articles, games using Scratch, and an assessment using Google Forms.  They formed their own groups and then they were off.









I asked them to first organize their ideas using Lucidchart which we connected to our Google Docs.

This is what they came up with so far with Lucidchart...

Names were removed above.

I will be posting more as this project evolves, but there is one last thing I want to note here.  I looked at my school email today and saw that three students have been using Google apps to do work over Spring Break!  In particular JM wrote an email to his classmates and myself. Below is what he said.

Those Who CAN Teach

Those who CAN, teach and well... those who cannot, reveal their misconceptions in a tutorial... 
Allow me to explain that statement below.

This post was inspired after I had the class create tutorials with the ShowMe app on the iPads and what I learned was a quite a surprise!  Here is how it all started.For the past several weeks my class has been on a journey to understand fractions.  It is has been a rocky road where according to the CCSS, expectations have been (along with other indicators) that my students will be able to:

Compare two fractions with the same numerator or the same denominator by reasoning about their size. Recognize that comparisons are valid only when the two fractions refer to the same whole. Record the results of comparisons with the symbols >, =, or <, and justify the conclusions, e.g., by using a visual fraction model.

Now we are at the "end of the unit" and I will assess the class in the coming week with a paper and pencil test.  Before we move on to a formal review of the concepts learned thus far, I thought why not have the class create tutorials so that we have them to use while studying.  Next year's kids would greatly benefit!

Friday morning the scene was set for a collection of awesome tutorials that explained comparing fractions. I had eager students and enough iPads equipped with the ShowMe app for them all to create their tutorials. After showing the students a tutorial I made for teachers wanting to use the app (shown below), the students were off in different parts of the room writing scripts.  Once finished, each child was encouraged to create a tutorial.  Enthusiasm about fractions was at an all-time high as I walked around helping students who were "stuck."

Later on, I started to watch the videos to see how they did.  Initially my reaction was a lot groaning and wincing as I watched student after student cheerfully explain the opposite of the concepts we had been discussing (I won't say teaching, because there clearly was not a whole lot of understanding).  I started to beat myself up and think, "What have I been doing wrong!"

Instead of drowning in my fraction sorrows, I thought about the situation in a new light.  Perhaps these tutorials were an opportunity, and not a failure.  These tutorials did what paper and pencil tasks or class discussions did not always reveal... the actual thought processes of my students while they were working through the mathematical problem.  After watching them, I created a spreadsheet of observations that will help me strengthen my instruction this week.  I plan on sharing some of the most accurate ones and then ask the students to be self-reflective of their tutorials.  Perhaps they will see the errors themselves... and perhaps I will have to be more direct.  They will have another opportunity to develop a second tutorial after they recognize possible improvements.  

This made me think about how we assess.  Ninety-nine percent of the time, kids are asked to explain their mathematical thinking in "numbers, words, and pictures."  When you look at that paper, what you see is what you get. The teacher still has to interpret what the child was thinking.  The students still could write an explanation down but have absolutely no idea what the strategy works.  

When creating the tutorials, my students' understanding was front and center. There is less room for interpretation if they themselves have to do the explaining.  Think-aloud protocols are nothing new to the educational research community, but I think it is more foreign to the general teaching community.  Recording our students thinking, I believe is a valuable tool (I did use this as a data collection method for my dissertation).  Even better is asking our students to teach someone else.  We all know to truly explain a topic to someone else, one has to understand it themselves.

Those who CAN, teach!

A New Approach to use "Drawing" for Writing: Using Drawings in Google Docs to Write a News Magazine

   The Set Up

     Who can resist the allure of watching the world's top athletes meeting to compete in dangerous, fast, and difficult sports.  It was Winter Olympic time again and the students in my class were charged with a writing mission: research and write a news article about Russia in general, Sochi as the venue for the Olympics, or how the Winter Olympics originated.  The second part was to research a sport of their choice and write a second article.  When I mentioned that we would be sharing these with other classes and that they would be posted online for anyone to watch, the excitement was palpable. 

Research Phase 

    After they received their topics, they went right to work.  A variety of print and online texts were used for the research part of the assignment.  To kick off the project we started with the Time For Kids article written for 3rd/4th graders and a collection of short passages I purchased from Teacherspayteachers.com from Logical Lex and other passages I downloaded from Readinga-z.com.  In addition, we used Google searches to find websites that answered the guiding questions in the research packet I made. We are in the process of understanding how to select key words for our search, finding an appropriate link in the search results, and how to use Google search tricks to find a key word in a specific website (i.e., site:timeforkids.org snowboarding).

    Already we hit many CCSS standards such as:

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.3.1 Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.3.2 Determine the main idea of a text; recount the key details and explain how they support the main idea.

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.3.5 Use text features and search tools (e.g., key words, sidebars, hyperlinks) to locate information relevant to a given topic efficiently.

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.3.7 Use information gained from illustrations (e.g., maps, photographs) and the words in a text to demonstrate understanding of the text (e.g., where, when, why, and how key events occur).

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.3.9 Compare and contrast the most important points and key details presented in two texts on the same topic.

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.3.2 Write informative/explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas and information clearly.

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.3.4 With guidance and support from adults, produce writing in which the development and organization are appropriate to task and purpose. (Grade-specific expectations for writing types are defined in standards 1–3 above.)

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.3.7 Conduct short research projects that build knowledge about a topic.

But the standard that was the most exciting for the class was this standard:

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.3.6 With guidance and support from adults, use technology to produce and publish writing (using keyboarding skills) as well as to interact and collaborate with others.

Composition Phase

     Once the students had answered all of the questions in the research packet, they moved on to composing their information into paragraphs.  Particularly, we focused on how to group the information so that the paragraphs focused on one main topic (which is easier said than done with third graders).  The paragraphs were written in their writing notebooks first and then revised.  I know that they could have done this in Google Docs and used the revision history as a record of editing and collaboration, but unfortunately my school lost Internet for a day and half into the project and we were the victim of two snow days before a week long vacation for President's Week.  Losing the Internet in particular put a damper on our researching time.

    Moving forward, we typed our paragraphs into a Google Doc and edited further. If we had more time we would have done more collaborative peer editing using the "comment" feature of Google Docs.

Digital Publishing Phase

     I must first tell you that I was initially at a loss as to how the students would create a digital newsletter.  I needed them to be able to combine headings and text in the column-style that is used in news articles with pictures.  I posted on Google + asking what others suggested.  Interestingly the answer came from a post about Math from Alice Keeler.  She shared how she used Google Drawing to create virtual Math manipulatives.  She inspired me and I created my own to reinforce the understanding of fractions on a number line, but then I started thinking about how else I can use Google Drawing... and then the idea was born!

    The class created a new document in Google Docs and then inserted drawings throughout their document. Google Drawings allowed them to create graphics, combine elements (using the "order tool", but most importantly acted as containers.  What I mean is that a picture was inserted in a drawing. That drawing when saved and closed could be placed anywhere on the page.  

Each paragraph was placed within a text box in a drawing so that columns could be made. Fancy text was made available through the Word Art function with a drawing as well- That went over big with the third graders). 

Once the drawing is saved you can drag it where ever you want if you click "wrap text."

This was not too difficult for third graders to do once I modeled some key skills and I was gratified to see that some of my students problem-solved. They then became the experts that could help others around them.  As the project progressed, we had so many people offering to help because the learning of skills had a "trickle-down" effect.  

The end result is that the students:

•  conducted a research project,
• wrote informative pieces that included multiple paragraphs,
• used digital tools to publish,
• wrote for an authentic audience- the school, parents, and friends,
• learned valuable skills for using Google Docs that went deeper and will transfer to other situations,
• learned valuable search skills within print and online texts
• learned how to find Google images that were labeled for reuse,
• and enjoyed having ownership over their learning....

All while meeting many of the ELA Common Core Standards!

You can see their projects on our class website- once they are all done and I have embedded the documents.  Here is a sneak preview.

The Road Less Traveled: Using the End Product to Fuel Learning

    Every school year is another opportunity.  Another opportunity to learn and grow as a professional as I read more professional literature, talk with talented educators, and meet extraordinary students.  Meeting the diverse needs of my students can be a daunting task when you throw in high-stakes testing and more rigorous standards that have just been implemented one year prior.  In light of this situation, I am constantly trying to figure out new and interesting ways to engage my students- and honestly myself.  How can we find the road less traveled?  There are no blatant road signs showing the way, or that I have found at least.

Photo by Ann Douglas downloaded from Flickr

    Last year was an "interesting" year spent teaching a new grade level while trying to find the materials and resources that would help me instruct within the Common Core State Standards framework.  Google became my friend as I scoured the Web to find information, advice, and printables and thankfully people out there are very willing to share.  New York decided to support modules created by Expeditionary Learning (EL) for English Language Arts and modules for Mathematics on their website Engageny.org and this year I have been exploring the use of some of the modules in both subject areas.  
    To be honest, at first I really disliked the modules.  My reasons are not what you are probably thinking. I had no issue with the texts for the EL units and although I balked at some of the tasks my students were asked to do in the beginning of the school year, I see how my students have grown and developed since participating.  My real issue was that these modules are highly scripted.  So much so, that I felt that I had no real voice in my classroom anymore.  Since it was my first time implementing the modules, I did not feel comfortable "putting my own stamp" on the lessons.  As this year progresses, I am slowly changing this thinking.
    Here is where craftiness comes to the fore.  Instead of conducting teacher-directed lessons, I began to think of how we can infuse more student ownership into these lessons. I have been influenced by books such as Catching Up or Leading the Way by Yong Zhao, Creativity in the Classroom (4th edition) by Alane Jordan, and now the Passion-Driven Classroom by Angela Maiers and Amy Sandvold.  How do I get my students to be more engaged, motivated, and learning?

Photo by CircumerroStock

    What would appear to be a passion for using technology "gone wild" is actually the source of my craftiness, my "lure for learning" as it would seem.  My students are my fish and my use of technology is the bait. I admit this and I am not ashamed.  
    Some examples of Math craftiness include:

• Arranging 24 Yoga Mats- Talking a friend into manipulating reality a little in order to teach my students about creating arrays for a more concrete representation of multiplication was one of the first lures used this year.  She is a yoga instructor so it was not out of the realm of possibility that she would need the help of my students to figure out how to arrange her yoga mats into equal groups if she had 24 students. (CCSS Math 3.OA.A.1; 3.OA.B.5) 

• Mondrian Art- Many of students love participating in anything that is outwardly "artsy" so why not learn about a famous contemporary artist while calculating the area of squares and rectangles? (CCSS Math 3.MD.C.5)

    Some examples of ELA craftiness include:

• Kidblog for Publishing- Since the beginning of the year I have had my students use Kidblog as a place for them to digitally publish their writing.  Knowing you have an audience, proved very motivating for my third-grade writers and they took more care to edit and revise for an audience.  They love being able to read each other's posts and comment on them.  We have read articles from Time for Kids and then written paragraphs summarizing key information.  These paragraphs were posted on Kidblog for everyone to see.  In September, we also used the Blogger (see our class blog) app to publish our personal narratives. (CCSS RI.3.2; RI.3.5; W.3.2; W.3.3; W.3.6)

• Aurasma Book Recommendations- After reading a book of the students' choice, they had to write a persuasive paragraph explaining why people should read their selection.  We ran into some memory issues when creating our videos using the Aurasma app; however, this led to an important lesson on summarization and finding the main idea.  The reviews my students had to come up with were quite concise but we still have the entire paragraph to refer back to once we work out some of the initial issues. (CCSS RL.3.2; RL.3.3; W.3.1; W.3.4; W.3.5; W.3.6)

• Northeast Travel Bureau Videos- The EL units we completed so far this year focused only on fiction texts so we have been reading informational texts at other points of the school day.  Instead of telling my students were were going to develop our comprehension strategies for reading informational texts, I told them that they were in charge of collecting information about the Northeast region of the US centered on the categories of economy/natural resources, geography, climate, and culture.  Lessons focused on finding main ideas and searching informational texts and then turning their information into persuasive writing pieces that would finally be turned into scripts for commercials for the "Northeast Travel Bureau."  They were in charge of collaborating with peers to develop the scripts and direct themselves.  If you click on the link above you will see that some groups created Google Presentations as a backdrop to their commercials (which also lent itself to a lesson on how to select images from a Google search that are earmarked as "labeled for reuse"). (CCSS RI.3.1; RI.3.2; RI.3.5; W.3.1; W.3.2; W.3.4, W.3.5; W.3.6; W.3.7; W.3.8)

    It makes me feel so good to look around the room (I can do this because they are in charge, not me) and see the animated faces and the furious writing, turning of pages, or clicking of keys.  In giving up control, I feel we all win.  I feel like I am an important piece to instruction by not being an important piece... if that makes any sense.

Drawing Parallels of Problem-solving

For the month of September I was lucky enough to have enough Xperia Z tablets for each student in my class courtesy of Sony.  I am a Sony Education Ambassador and I was provided with the tablets to do a case study. My goal was to see how the tablets could enhance learning in authentic ways.  I videotaped throughout the study and had the students themselves speak about using the tablets. 

What resonated for me was that although tablets were fun for the students, they really were an opportunity for problem-solving.  What I learned from my dissertation was that reading online required different usage of strategies and problem-solving as the second graders used search engines.  This certainly applied to working with the tablets.  Apps are like websites.  Many apps work together and are connected much like hyperlinks between web pages and sites.  For example, my students had to figure out which apps would accomplish their goals and how to get video, audio, and pictures into those apps. One of the tasks they had to accomplish was to annotate a blank map of the world with the names of the continents.  First, they needed to access the blank map by opening Google Drive. Once Google Drive opened the map it was sent to the Album app.  From the Album app it could be shared to Skitch for the annotations.  When the students were done they exported their maps back to Google Drive.  Some of the students toggled between the Google Earth app or Google images (where they first had to do a search to find completed apps).

Who knew that to create this picture it would take so much work!

The case study ended with a large Social Studies project in which the students were told to use the tablets in anyway they wanted to teach others what they new about the seven continents and five oceans (including the Southern Ocean).  Now that was a lot of problem-solving. I will discuss it in more detail in a future post. 

Fostering Reading Comprehension Strategies in Young Children- Print and Online

      So here is the moment I have been waiting for... a chance to share my dissertation in a relevant and meaningful way with the people who have the power to make changes- teachers.  My goal is to relate my research of second-grade readers to the requirements of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

     The CCSS require that students in the younger grades be exposed to and receive instruction in strategies for reading informational text.  I found plenty of educational researchers that supported this move, rather than waiting until students were older like fourth grade.  Conversely, there are some other educational researchers that believe that children need to learn to read (focusing on decoding and fluency) before they can read to learn (focusing on comprehension strategies).  I fall into the former category because 10 years of experience in first grade clearly showed me that young children are very capable of using comprehension strategies. In particular, their interest in knowing more about their world such as dinosaurs, wolves, cars, etc. inspired beginning readers to even attempt reading, let alone read independently (the decodeable readers such as the Fat Cat Sat on the Mat did not lend themselves to student-created informative posters, pictures, or even blurbs for a Web site).  Informational text belongs in a primary grade classroom.

     In the interest of keeping this discussion briefer than my actual dissertation, I will move on to the more practical applications of my findings and how they relate to the Common Core.

     Last year I read with 4 second-grade students who were reading above the benchmark level based on a print-based informal reading inventory in January of the school year.  These students also showed basic Internet knowledge such as using a search engine, conducting key word searches, and maneuvering within a hypertext environment (scrolling, clicking on links, using the back button). Next, I asked all four students to locate information about endangered animals in a book, on a closed hypertext Web site, and through open Internet searches.  They were asked why the topics of the texts were endangered and then I recorded them think aloud while they found the information.  After transcribing their think-alouds I looked for which reading comprehension strategies they used. This was compared within reading contexts, across reading contexts, and across readers.  I used the previous research of Julie Coiro as a guide when analyzing my data. A comprehensive list of strategies were found to be used by the second graders.

     Since writing the dissertation, the CCSS are implemented all over the country and administrators and teachers are seeking information on how to best lift our students' abilities to match these rigorous standards.  Available on the Common Core site is a great chart of how the standards spiral as students progress through the grades. Below are the informational text standards for K-3. I include 3rd grade because it is always important to know where instruction is headed as instruction becomes for complex and sophisticated.

If we break down this list and compare to the comprehensive list of strategies used in my dissertation, the strategies that the CCSS are asking our students to use are:

• Determining Importance

• Inferring/Connecting

• Integrating/Elaborating

• Evaluating

• Monitoring

• Questioning

• Searching

      Delving deeper, although there are some similarities in strategy use with print vs. online text, there are some key differences.  These differences center around what researchers Afflerbach and Cho (2008) call "realizing and constructing potential texts to read."  This is best illustrated by asking people to think about what they would do to find the answer to a question in a print book while at the library.  If I put a book in front of you, asked you a question, and told you to find the answer in this book, you would most likely look at the table of contents, index, headings, etc. to narrow down a place to look in the text.  You might be pretty confident that the information is located in the book somewhere and that the information contained in the book in entirely true.  Now think about if I asked you to look up the answer to a question using open Internet searching.  What would you have to do then?  Where do you go?  How do retrieve the relevant information?  Who do you trust to provide valid information?
     Essentially, your process will be different because you need to construct the potential of texts to read first before you can read a Web site for an answer.  You will need to think of the essential ideas and then come up with relevant search terms.  Changing the wording of your search terms by using synonyms may yield better results.  Once the search results with Web sites are returned to you, you will next have to make a decision about which Web sites are more pertinent to your goal than others.  How do you judge this? Do you look at the Web site title, the URL, or the short blurb under the link?  Which Web site can you trust that the information is accurate and up to date?  
    Once you are in the Web site there are further considerations for where to read.  The Web site may have a navigation bar that leads to hidden pages.  Like a book's table of contents, you need to make predictions about where to go to find the answer to your question; however, unlike a book you cannot flip through the pages first to judge relevance.  You need to click on the link and then decide if the page was a good choice. Did we mention that if you click on hyperlinks embedded in the text you may end up reading a totally different Web site?  Phew!  There is a lot to consider here as you now try to figure out how to repair your reading path back to that original spot.  The World Wide Web is really a spider web of information!

    That being said, how do we teach our primary-age students the essential skills to be able to successfully find information in print and online text?



Stay tuned for more specifics in future posts.