Week 5 (Formative Assessment)

This week’s resources were very interesting to watch and learn about.  The formative assessment idea is something I never really thought about but learning about it makes a lot of sense.  The idea of using pre-assessment test to determine how you are going to teach your lesson is a genius idea and I am shocked I have not heard of this before.  I have taken pre-test before classes, but I never realized the importance of them or even the reasoning behind them.  Having students take a test to show you what they already know, will really help a teacher focus more on which kids are struggling and with what areas they are struggling.   I also like how the teacher in the video included two self-assessment questions to the student’s assignments.  “what did I do well?” and “how can I get better?” are the two questions that can help the students see where they stand in the class, and what they might need extra help with.  Then I learned about all these formative assessment apps, which makes life a litter less stressful for teachers. The other video talked about how some apps work and how they can help organize all the teacher’s information and data they collected.   These apps are easy to use and help teachers keep the scores and use easy to read graph to get a good overview of how the class may be doing.  The video also mentions how technology helps with communication between co-works: not only sharing curriculum ideas, but also allows the teachers to share the student’s assessments between their other teachers.   As a physical education teacher, I will have to pre-test me student in a more physical aspect and set goals to get better.  There is also a National Physical Fitness test that I will have to use to asses all my future students. 

Week 4 - Flipping the classroom.

Reading this week resources was very eye-opening because I very really thought about what is put into creating a test.  Bloom’s Taxonomy did a very good job breaking up the details that we as teachers should be using to create a quiz or test. Giving the six steps of thinking and even breaking those down into even more detail helped me understand the concept of each category and organize my thought of how I would create a test.  Starting with the first step of being able to recall and remember something like the terminology of muscles is very important for my students to grasp before I could move onto teaching them what those muscles do.  As a physical educator, I know that learning the anatomy and physiology of the body is important to understand how the body works.  Helping my students understand what they are eating and how they are moving and how it affects their body will help them develop self-knowledge about themselves, this jumps all the way into abstract knowledge, more specifically metacognitive.  Having my student learning by using this taxonomy system I think would be greatly beneficial in my future classroom.  
I also think that constructivist learning is another great concept I can incorporate into my future classroom.  This makes me think of the storytelling idea, how making those personal connections really helps the students remember the information better.  As well as the whole flipped classroom idea, I think that is brilliant.  Having the student learning about the sport or activity that we will be doing prior to doing it will allow the class to participate in the activity longer, which in return permits the children to be active longer while in their gym classes.  I like how this approach, gives the students the most out of the time given per period.