Digital Blog Post #J

Three Concepts to Reflect

This time finding myself in the school library, Chapter 11 "Engaging Students in Performance Assessment and Reflective Learning" reflects how both teachers and students use technology to assess and evaluate learning. Student assessment, which is the first term that caught my eye, is how a teacher would assess students' learning and teacher effectiveness" (Maloy, Verock-O'Laoghlin, Edwards, & Woolf, 2014). There are several evaluations to perform such as report cards, meetings with families, and oral/written feedback to students. As a VPK teacher, some of the student assessments that I perform are observation reports and parent-teacher conferences. I found this term interesting because I just conducted several parent-teacher conferences earlier this week.

The second term I found interesting is a digital teaching portfolio. A digital teaching portfolio "is a collection of educational and professional materials stored in an electronic format"  (Maloy, Verock-O'Laoghlin, Edwards, & Woolf, 2014). I found this term very useful and I honestly want to start on creating my own soon so I can reflect on what I did as a VPK teacher and carry it with me to Kindergarten. I would like to see what I should improve upon for the betterment of my class.

Prior knowledge-based learning, which was the third term that caught my attention, is "the idea that when teaching new concepts, teachers need to connect their lessons to what students already know or have been taught"  (Maloy, Verock-O'Laoghlin, Edwards, & Woolf, 2014). I feel that prior knowledge-based learning is extremely relevant to VPK because it helps the students remember more fluently what they were just taught. When I lesson plan, I try to keep certain topic transition into the next theme.

Chapter 11 had me think of how important it is to not only keep track of how your students are doing, but how you, as the teacher, is doing as well. I will definitely be putting together a digital teaching portfolio to keep track of my progress as I apply prior-knowledge based learning to my lesson plans!




References
Hunt, A. (2015, November 2). Chapter 11:. Retrieved November 2, 2015.

Maloy, R., O'Loughlin, R., Edwards, S., & Woolf, B. (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education Inc.