Teaching with Technology - Reflecting on my triggering question (Module 2)

How can I effectively use technology such as computers, tablets, and even cell phones as a formative and summative assessment tool to evaluate students’ ELA skills, including comprehension of reading texts and specific writing abilities?

Getting feedback from and to my students has always been a challenge as an English teacher. When I teach students to write, I have to have them write, and assessing writing takes time. When I can work with a student one-on-one I can immediately see a student’s strengths and challenges, and I can provide feedback to that student that they can use to improve their writing. I have 136 students, however, and I can't give them all individual attention. For the last module I saw the effectiveness of using online collaboration tools as a means of giving students feedback. For this module I looked into the use of blogs and their potential for formative assessment. I believe this ties directly into ISTE Standard 2, which is Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessment.

Formative assessment during the process of writing a paper is limited as I run around the room, going from student asking question to student sitting there looking at her paper. The final paper takes me up to three weeks to grade, so any feedback is outdated and ineffective. A blog, however, would allow students to publish their work online and give me the opportunity to provide them some feedback that they could use to revise their work. Stover, Yearta, and Harris (2016) identify assessing reading comprehension as one of three major benefits of this kind of online interaction. In their case study, their teacher used a rubric with the class that guided her feedback to the students (p. 378). A focused rubric would allow me to concentrate my feedback on one particular skill, rather than grading holistically and overwhelming the student with information.

Another benefit the authors found was the teacher’s ability to differentiate instruction (p. 379). The teacher was able to provide “unique responses to scaffold and guide instruction within blog posts” (p. 379). The advantage here seems obvious. Any individual feedback is tailored to the student. Even with a focused rubric, I can give a student direction on his writing that ties to the skills I'm teaching.

I’m not the only one who can give feedback on a blog. Students now write papers for an audience of one - me. With a blog, their audience can grow. I can assign students to read classmates’ blogs and provide feedback based on the rubric. The idea of having an audience is an advantage noted in Matt Richtel’s New York Times article (2012). Richtel cites research that shows students “feel more impassioned by the new literacy. They love writing for an audience, engaging with it” (Richtel, 2012). As teachers, our job is to engage our students, and if they're engaged with blogging, then why not do it?

My students live in the digital age, and I believe the appropriate use of blogs in their English class would help keep them engaged and see the value of their writing. At the same time, I have the ability to better my use of assessment and shape it to their needs, helping them develop into stronger and more effective writers.

References

Richtel, M. (2012, Jan. 20). Blogs vs. term papers. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com

Stover, K., Yearta, L., & Harris, C. (2016). Formative assessment in the digital age: blogging with third graders. The Reading Teacher. 69:4, 377-381. doi:10.1002/trtr.1420