CEP 812 TechQuest: Problem of Practice

Educational Need: 
The need that is to be fulfilled is timely and meaningful evaluative feedback for students and parents regarding their progress.  Currently, I give traditional quizzes and tests and feedback is slow and not thorough.  When I sit down at conferences, for the most part, I cannot say to Mr. and Mrs. Jones that lil Billy is struggling with x, y, and z, but has improved of mastered a, b, and c.  I want to be able to do this.  This will help students and parents focus their learning for improvement.

Addressing issue with Technology:  
I plan to use two technologies, at the moment, to improve feedback. 
1)  I will take a look at Examview (and possibly other software/online programs) that allow me to generate questions and attach State of Michigan learning objectives to the question.  This will help when creating tests, however, I’m not sure how to enter graded data into the computer in a meaningful way, a way that outlines targets mastered and skills that need further development.  I need to find a way to generate a list of learning targets and a way to keep track of this per student.  

2)  I plan to use Student Response Systems to track student progress.  As I generate questions to be used with the clickers, I can also associate the questions with learning targets.  The difference here is that the data (student responses) will be received via the clickers and be exported to a spreadsheet for immediate feedback on learning targets mastered.  I am aware that guidelines need to be established with students before use of the clickers.  I have used the Turning Point Technologies clickers in my classroom and am well aware of the challenges they can present.  The structure will be key to the success of their use.  In the fall, our school is getting sets of the Qwizdom Student Response Systems so I will try to focus my research on this system and its capabilities, in particular, but will also dedicate a significant portion of my investigation to SRSs in general.  

I do realize that the collection of this data will be two-fold.  It will help provide information to students and parents about their progress, but will also provide me, as the instructor, with information about student learning that will guide my teaching practices and curricular focus in future lessons. 

Relevant research and resources: 

Initially, I plan to use the websites fo the following:
-eInstruction (Examview assessment suite)
-State of Michigan Dept. of Education High School Content Expectations
-Study Island
-Qwizdom
I do realize, however, that this list will expand greatly once I did into my research. 

Implementation Plan:  

Much of what I plan to implement during this course is related to creation of assessments using the tools available to me.  I want to explore the ease or difficulty with which I can create questions and tie learning targets to them.  I also want to explore writing a variety of types of questions, not just multiple choice, using Examview and Qwizdom software.  
Future implementation will take place as I am able to use this assessment tools with students in the classroom and attempt to generate reports and give feedback that will guide future teaching and learning efforts.  

Four common places of education:

Teacher/Facilitator:   As the teacher, I will need to learn the software used with the student response system and familiarize myself with online resources that could help with student assessment.  I will also need to work on crafting questions that solicit meaningful responses from students so that I am assessing them in a legitimate way.

Learner:   The learner will have very little to learn in the way of the technology.  However, students will need to be coached as to how best to use the results and feedback to improve their understanding and mastering of skills.

Subject matter: The subject matter (Algebra 1) will need to be broken down to a set of concepts and skills for evaluation purposes.

Setting: There needs to be some instructions given to students about how to use the student response systems in the classroom setting.  In addition to this, the computer lab will need to be loaded with the appropriate software or access granted to appropriate websites to be used.  The teacher will need to address what student behavior is to be like when using the SRSs in class.  Also, when in the computer lab, students will need to be monitored so that they are on-task.