Digital Anecdotes Week 8 Blog

 

As a relatively new educator, an area I can benefit from improving is collecting anectodes and observations on my students. Data gathering and interpretation is arguably one of the most important responsibilities of a teacher.  As a member of the Ontario College of Teachers, it is my responsibility to follow the "Professional Practice" Standards of Practice:

"Members apply professional knowledge and experience to promote student learning. They use appropriate pedagogy, assessment and evaluation, resources and technology in planning for and responding to the needs of individual students and learning communities. Members refine their professional practice through ongoing inquiry, dialogue and reflection".

Assessment lets us see a child's progress and enables educators to take a step back and reflect on how they can/should modify their lessons in order to bring about learning in the class. It lets us differentiate, or cater lessons for individual students, and acts as a wheel that helps guide our instruction.  "Assessment for learning is designed to give teachers information to modify and differentiate teaching and learning activities. ...Teachers can also use this information to streamline and target instruction and resources, and to provide feedback to students to help them advance their learning" (Government of Ontario). 

While I understand the importance of collecting anecdotal information and recording student observations, I find that this is the part of my job that a) takes the longest and b) interrupts the flow of my day c) I am the least organized about.

I decided to look into what sort of relief the edtech world could provide me with:

Confer:  An app that makes it quick and easy to take notes on your students. You can add multiple classes, students and expectations. It is customizable, you can share the notes with other teachers and even has a sorting feature which helps you group students based on needs. It is available on the Apple store as well as in Google Play.

Snapfolio: From the makers of Confer, this app will enable users to do the same as Confer, but adds in the features of being able to take pictures, videos and link them with the students’ files.

Evernote: This app is designed for note taking, organizing, and archiving. It is not specifically designed for teachers in mind, but can easily be adapted for their use. Evernote allows its users to create different formatted notes (pictures, webpages, file attachments etc).  Like the other apps aforementioned, the app enables you to create “notebooks” that can be tagged and edited and shared. 

Apart from my initial hesitation to try something different, I am also a little skeptical about adding even more tech time to my working hours. I sometimes worry about what it must look like to a bystander seeing me constantly sitting in front of my computer whenever I am not teaching a class. In order to take these anecdotals I would be snapping pictures of student work and walking around with my tablet. I do not want to take time away from my students and I know that learning to use a new program always takes time. At the same time, I need to keep reminding myself that this would only be short-lived and that these overall benefits would outweigh the “costs”.

I am very excited to try these new tools out and begin my paperless assessment journey. Please let me know if you are familiar with any of them and if you have any tips!

References

Government of Ontario. (n.d.). Education For All. Retrieved March 4, 2016, from http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/general/elemsec/speced/LearningforAll2013.pdf

Standards of Practice | Ontario College of Teachers. (n.d.). Retrieved March 04, 2016, from http://www.oct.ca/public/professional-standards/standards-of-practice