Reflection for Module 2 - Emerging Practices of Online Assessment

I had not thought much about using blogs as part of my classroom before the discussion and reading in this module. Realistically, I know it will be very difficult to break the ice at school, because while all the teachers, administrators, parents and most of the students use it regularly, the “pitfalls” are feared. I know some of my classmates do not understand that kind of thinking. However, having the resources to provide protection for the students is a real issue in a school that is not publicly funded.
That being said, I still feel like I am on the shaky end of the learning curve with blogs. Even though my family has its own blog, I haven’t had to set up anything. I started this module wondering how a chronological set of paragraphs of random thoughts could be used for class learning. I ended up creating a blog on edublogs.com and blogger.com. I found that edublogs seemed to have more choices in theme, but that blogger.com was very easy to understand. For me at this time, that is important.

I have been thinking about the constructivists view that students use their existing knowledge or what they already know to build new information. This is called a knowledge base. When students do a wide range of reading, they acquire a wide base of understanding that helps them to understand by connecting new suggestions with the ones they already know. I am thinking that whatever it takes, by blogs or using the internet or creating projects, students need to increase that knowledge base because it is crucial to basic understanding. Since I started teaching the younger secondary students (7th grade), I have found students that have so little metacognition, and have great difficulty drawing from their knowledge base. I wonder if it is a genuine lack of knowledge, or if the stress of middle school makes the connections and inferences inaccessible. Either way, a constructivist philosophy of teaching should address those issues. It should draw the students out and get them to grasp for connections because they “own” their work. This helps me to understand the value of the learner-centered approach to teaching and encourages me to move my teaching style more in that direction.

The discussion about the relationship between measurement, assessment and evaluation was interesting. So many schools only measure and use that as evaluation. Assessment that takes place in the classroom, generating adjustments in teaching methods and student responses, are rarely reported or used as part of overall evaluation. I think rubrics can solve that problem by articulating levels of competency in areas that are difficult to quantify.

So, my plans for all the information that I have learned in this module is to try to incorporate the use of a blog in one of my classes. Realistically, it does take a policy change in the administration and that could move very slowly. In the meantime, I will continue to share what I am learning with them, hoping they will get excited about it themselves.