Can I evaluate you?

Once again I have consumed lots and lots of information over the past few days! Everything I learn in this class are topics that you can not avoid as teachers. I feel that everything I learn in this class is so important and will come in handy one day. This week reading up on assessments and rubrics and safety are for sure three things that are unavoidable as teachers. As soon as I hear the word assessments my mind goes to evaluating performance. Authentic Assessment goes hand in hand with web 2.0 in my opinion. It is obvious that as teachers you are evaluating student and their work. They aren't doing all the work for you not to notice. By having rubrics to evaluate their performance, the students are aware of what is expected of them. At least it is one of the ways. Traditional Assessment, with the reading from the textbook, write an essay about what you read, and then let me give you a multiple choice test to make sure you understood what you read, does not interest students anymore. Traditional Assessment is no longer in the question if you want to lead a productive, fun, yet educational classroom. Students need authentic assessment to keep engaged in their work. As teachers we are preparing students to go into the "real world". They are going to need to learn how to do tasks which will make them productive citizens. To learn these tasks they need fun! Of course standards can not be forgotten, so you have to create tasks around these standards. For example, Dr. Smirnova gave us a website to read up on assessments,
one of the examples within the website is a lesson teachers gave to their elementary students about fairy tales. They have the students think of fairy tales, something they are interested in, and incorporate it into the standards. One example, is to write a letter to someone in a fairytale from another character in the story. It incorporates the standards while making them feel like they are not forced to do something boring.
Rubrics are obviously very important parts to assessments. You need to evaluate students, obviously is an important part of teaching. There are so many different rubrics for every type of activity, including web 2.0 activities such as Glogster.
Here is a rubric I created from Rubistar.

Making A Collage : Who you are!

Teacher Name: Ms. Lease


Student Name: __________________________________

CATEGORY	4-Excellent	3-Very Good	2-Good	1-Poor
Quality of Construction	The collage shows considerable attention to construction. The items are neatly trimmed. All items are carefully and securely attached to the backing. There are no stray marks, smudges or glue stains. Nothing is hanging over the edges.	The collage shows attention to construction. The items are neatly trimmed. All items are carefully and securely attached to the backing. A few barely noticeable stray marks, smudges or glue stains are present. Nothing is hanging over the edges.	The collage shows some attention to construction. Most items are neatly trimmed. All items are securely attached to the backing. A few barely noticeable stray marks, smudges or glue stains are present. Nothing is hanging over the edges.	The collage was put together sloppily. Items appear to be just "slapped on". Pieces may be loose or hanging over the edges. Smudges, stains, rips, uneven edges, and/or stray marks are evident.
Design	Graphics are trimmed to an appropriate size and interesting shape and are arranged well, some in front and some behind. Care has been taken to balance the pictures across the canvas.	Graphics are trimmed to an appropriate size and interesting shape and are arranged with some items in front and others behind. The canvas, however does not appear balanced.	Graphics have been trimmed to an appropriate size and shape, but the arrangement of items is not very attractive. It appears there was not a lot of planning of the item placement.	Graphics are untrimmed OR of inappropriate size and/or shape. It appears little attention was given to designing the collage.
Creativity	Several of the graphics or objects used in the collage reflect an exceptional degree of student creativity in their creation and/or display	One or two of the graphics or objects used in the collage reflect student creativity in their creation and/or display.	One or two graphics or objects were made or customized by the student, but the ideas were typical rather than creative (.e.g, apply the emboss filter to a drawing in Photoshop).	The student did not make or customize any of the items on the collage.
Titles and Text	Titles and text were written clearly and were easy to read from a distance. Text varied in color, size and/or style for different text elements.	Titles and text were written clearly and were easy to read close-up. Text varied in color, size and/or style for different text elements.	Titles and text were written clearly and were easy to read close-up. There was little variation in the appearance of text.	Titles and/or text are hard to read, even when the reader is close.

This site is so simple, it allows you to pick out a subject and gives you the outline of the rubric and allows you to modify it anyway you wish. It also provides interactive rubrics to give your students more detailed feedback. This rubric is the text they fill in for you. It is very detailed and lets you pick what categories you evaluate the students on. It is such an easy website, and once I get more experienced I will be able to write in the boxes more detailed outlines of particular projects.
The last very important topic I used this week is Internet Safety and copyright issues. It is very stressful knowing that you have to watch out for every piece of information that you are teaching is not copyrighted. It is hard when you want to show a video that fits your lesson perfectly but the material is copyrighted. Reading these articles gave me so much information I did not know about guidelines about the laws. It is also so important for students to know their safety and copyright laws, because when creating their work they can run into copyright issues they may not know about. Policy This letter is a great thing to send home with the students so that parents can go over the rules and laws of Use Policy. As teachers it is also your responsibility to let the students know about these policies, but it is also good for parents to understand and go over it with their children.

Overall, once again I learned lots and lots of valuable information this week I will be taking with me along the journey!