Capturing student learning - using technology

Assessment isn't just about what students write on tests.

I am not claiming to be an expert on this.  Far from it.  What I am, is someone who enjoys conversations around assessments, especially assessment of inquiry-based learning.  If anything, my journey through this M.A. has been an humbling experience that constantly exposes me to wonderful practices, thoughtful philosophies and a spectrum of ideologies.  But from experience and from literature, I can pretty confidently say that the more evidence we have of student learning – the better.  In addition, the more types of evidence we have – the better.

This is especially the case when we are engineering our classrooms through inquiry-based approaches.  Here I am talking about approaches that gets students to do and play with math, and not just memorize and regurgitate.  You can see many many many examples around the math twitter blogosphere right now (Dan, Bryan, Fawn, Al, to name a few...).

e.g. something like this where the students create their own questions and bring in their own plushies to do some bungee jumping

Or something like this where students ask how many marshmallows fit in the palm of their hands

So we’re doing all these amazing things to encourage and foster questioning, thinking and learning… but then most of us resort to writing paper tests as the sole source of evidence of their learning. 

I felt something was missing.

This missing piece is the focus of my thesis.

Up until recently I have been using ThreeRing as a primary way for me to store and interpret student evidence in picture and video form.

But a few weeks ago I went to edcampOttawa, and I bumped into these guys:

And they have developed a program that seems similar to ThreeRing, but different.

They still need to pump out that iOS version for me to fully invest everything in there (currently they have a browser and android version), but it looks ambitious and promising.  

Let me indicate the few things I like about it:

 1. Embedded Ontario curriculum expectations (and the US common core standards):

As well as details of the overall expectations of each course

2. Rubrics that can be custom created:

3. it doesn't tell you how to teach or how to assess.  It presents itself as an useful tool for teachers to use.  Like Desmos, they seem to welcome feedback (for now).

@PaiMath Thanks for the shout out, and all of your great feedback this afternoon!
— Sesame IO (@sesameio) November 23, 2013

4. the fact that programs and apps like ThreeRing and SesameIO are up and coming, is good indication that these type of evidence of student learning is catching on.

5. It's a Canadian company, and it actually has relations to our curriculum!  No offense to all my US friends, but having to read through your common core documents in addition to our own... is interesting... but time consuming.

A few things that I'd like to see them add are things like:

1. Currently we can only add notes (on the website) when we go into a specific student (unless I am wrong about this…)  It would be nice if the “add note” option is just right on the main page.  And then we could select from a drop down menu as to where each picture will end up.

2. There needs to be a common sharing ground of some sort between students.  This would allow room for peer feedback as well as self reflection.

3. It would be nice for simultaneous uploads to allow for simultaneous inputs for tags of students – instead of having multiple uploads for one student.


What programs have you been using to this end?  I'd love to hear about it!