Blog week 2

1. What did you learn this week? The four technology explorations were interesting. I have used a few of them on a regular basis but I had forgotten how easy it was to use the rubric maker for my students. I firmly believe that a rubric should be presented to the students whenever possible. Without a rubric, the students have no idea how they will be graded and don't understand the expectation you have prior to beginning the experiment. As a teacher, it is often difficult to be sure each student has these items but is almost a necessary tool for student success. With this being said, I think it is important for school districts to remove the constant criticism of paper use in the classroom. Printers and paper is at a minimum in many Kentucky schools and this is a serious problem when trying to implement things like rubrics in the classrom.
 
2.What steps will you take to implement this in your classroom? Although, paper is an issue in the classroom, I will begin using rubrics more often. For formative assessments, I will use the same rubric in grading and will give this to the students prior to their next formative assessment. I will have them place this in their science notebook so they can refer back to it when necessary. Also, I will place this on my teacher website for when the student is performing an activity at home.

3.What challenge(s) will you face when using this in your classroom? I think the main issue I will face when trying to incorporate this in the classroom is that the students have not been influenced by rubrics in the science classroom. For many science classrooms, I find the teachers to be doing projects that require less writing and more "doing". I tend to fall in the middle of these two areas of teaching and often face difficulties when expectations are set for the students. My 8th grade students are required to pass an 8th grade exam prior to moving to high school and I set my expectations that require high skills and effort to recieve A's.

4.What will you do to overcome the challenge(s)? I discussed this in an earlier question. Because the largest challenges are student use and school district distribution of ink and paper, I will provide one rubric to be used for all formative assessments. I will also use a large poster board with the expectations to be hung in the classroom for daily use. In addition, as discussed, I will upload the rubric for both summative and formative assessments to my classroom website.