Educators understand and use data to drive their instruction and support students in achieving their learning goals. Educators Provide alternative ways for students to demonstrate competency and reflect on their learning using technology; Use technology to design and implement a variety of formative and summative assessments that accommodate learner needs, provide timely feedback to students and inform instruction; Use assessment data to guide progress and communicate with students, parents and education stakeholders to build student self-direction.
-ISTE Standards for Educators
Getting feedback from students is critical for an educator to know how to improve and which techniques are working in the classroom and for their students. Assessments are a way for educators to understand how their students are handling certain material. ALEKS is an AI program that takes in student data to understand who is comprehending what material: "ALEKS starts everyone at the same point. But from the moment students begin to answer the practice questions that it automatically generates for them, ALEKS’ machine-learning algorithms are analyzing their responses to figure out which concepts they understand and which they don’t."
Oremus, Will. “The Textbook Is Dying. Meet the Artificially Intelligent Software That's Replacing It. .” Slate Magazine, Slate, 25 Oct. 2015, www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/10/adaptive_learning_software_is_replacing_textbooks_and_upending_american.html. |
Prior to this course, I was not able to properly fulfill the requirements on this particular standard. I understood that I needed to acquire student data and change my learning style from there, but I was unsure on how exactly to accomplish that. I found, however, that there are an abundance of tools at my disposal to help me gather my student's data and work and improving and delivering feedback from there. My personal favorites are Kahoot! and Socrative. Kahoot! is great for younger age groups, and I always find it fun when my students get excited about "playing a game" during class when they are technically still learning and developing! I love the automatic responses I get from my students. Socrative, I have found, is great for middle and high school ages. An educator is able to get instant feedback on this app as well, but instead of multiple choice answers like on Kahoot!, you are able to ask for open-ended questions and provide automatic feedback on right and wrong questions. These apps have already helped me a great deal when planning lesson plans as well as teaching students for the first time. |