Assessments on Canvas

I've been enjoying a relaxed summer schedule to work on things for next year at a comfortable pace.  

One of the things I'm working on is moving our assessments from paper to our learning management system, Canvas.  I was hesitant to test on Canvas when we first started using it two years ago because it was all so new and there was so much for both me and the students to learn.  

This past year we gave our semester exams on Canvas successfully, and I've been using it more for assignments as well, so I think I'm ready to put regular quizzes and tests on Canvas as well.  

It takes some time to input the quizzes, but then the grading is quick and there's no paper to deal with.  I only have German 1 and 2 next year, so it seems like a good time to switch those classes over.

Here's what a vocabulary quiz will look like:

Nouns have two boxes, one for the article and one for the noun, so that students can get partial credit if they miss the article.  Verbs have just one box.  These questions are graded automatically by the computer.  Other questions are teacher graded: 

I am requiring that students type ß and umlauts correctly.  It's something that we practice in class, and I include the special characters in the instructions for students to copy and paste if they have difficulty with the character codes.  On the first quiz of the year, students still receive full credit even without the umlaut but get a reminder that they need to use umlauts correctly on all future assessments.

All of the vocabulary questions are in question banks, so students' questions will not be in the same order as their neighbors, and it makes generating a parallel quiz for a retake a snap.  

Is this the Normandy Invasion or just a Retakes Tutorial?

I had my first quiz and test make-up and retake tutorial on Friday.  

Oh. my. goodness. 

32 students.

2 different levels of German.

7 different assessments, 2 of which with listening components.

Beforehand I wasn't sure if I was getting ready for a tutorial or the Normandy Invasion.  I think it required at least as much planning and coordination.

Due to some technical difficulties above my pay grade, tutorials started later this school year than usual.  Combine that with how many of my students struggled on the first quiz, and I had so many students needing to make-up or retake assessments that my tutorial reached capacity and I had to bump some students to next week.  

But thanks to my retake form and all of my meticulous planning, everyone got the right assessment.  Now I just need to grade them...

Week 3 in Review

I started participating in #teach180 on Monday, and it's been a lot of fun so far.  (Though I do have to admit I'm a little nervous about forgetting to take a picture one of these days.  It's possible that I am a little bit of a perfectionist.)  One of the benefits of taking a picture of my school life and tweeting it every day is that I have a record of some of the highlights of my school week.  

So here's a review of my third week of the school year:

Monday was Tough Love Day, which I've already blogged about.  

Tuesday was Gold Star Day: Although a lot of my students struggled on their first quiz, I did have quite a few students who scored 90% of better.  Those students got a gold star with their name and class period on it which I put up on my back chalkboard.  The title "Wir können" means We can, and then I have the topic of the quiz posted (German 1 Greetings and Alphabet on the left, German 3/4 Conversational Past, Narrative Past, and Past Perfect on the right).  The stars have magnets on the back so I can move and change them as we go on to new topics.

On Wednesday my German 1 students made their first foldable when I taught them the subject pronouns.  We used a Shutterflap 6, which is perfect for a lot of grammar topics because it has a spot for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person in singular and plural.  

These are the student supply boxes which I have at every table.  The cards on the left are conversation practice cards - one set for 1st year and one set for 3/4.  They are available to students whenever they finish early and need something to do.  I though I had blogged about these already, but I guess not.  A topic for another post...

We also played Ich habe, wer hat? for the first time Wednesday in German 1.  Some of the students had played I have, who has? in elementary school, but it still took the classes some time to get the hang of it.  So, times were slow, but everyone had fun.  (For the record per. 4 had the fastest time, but they messed up and had to do a re-start to get that time, and per. 5 had the fastest time on a first try.)

Here's a look at my new alphabet in my new room for this year.  The colorful letters are Alphabet Circle Stamp Clip Art from Mr. Math Coach's Teachers Pay Teachers store and cost only $1 - a great deal!

On Friday, German 1 students took their first vocabulary quiz of the year.  Scores were MUCH better than on the first quiz: in one of my sections, the average on the first quiz was 64%, while on this one it went up to 87%.  I think Tough Love Monday may have had the desired effect... I hope!

Tough Love Monday

I did my first #teach180 tweet today.  I won't always be able to blog about my picture, but today I do have time to write about Tough Love Monday:

I gave my first quizzes of the year in both German 1 and German 3/4 on Thursday and Friday.  The results were mixed, which is kind of what I expected.  Some of my students have a solid understanding of what we've done so far in class and know how to prepare for an assessment.  Other students aren't always focused in class, haven't completed assignments on time, and aren't sure how they need to study for a quiz or test in German. These students did not do well.  

Before I returned quizzes today, I told students about how their quiz score gives them some important information: if they scored well, they are on the right track and should keep doing what they are doing.  If not, they need to make some changes: either in their participation in class or in how much or how they are studying.  

Then, I showed them how to fill out a retake form, using my sample quiz (Schülerin Swank = Student Swank) as an example.  This year I am requiring students to correct their first quiz or test before signing up to retake.  I hope this will push students to work harder at figuring out what they didn't understand before retaking, rather than just trying again without any serious practice and hoping they will magically score better.  We'll see how it goes...

Revising Retakes

Although the middle and high schools in my district do not use Standards Based Grading (the elementary schools do), students are allowed to retake quizzes and tests, which is a concept that often goes along with SBG.  I didn't know about this until about 3 weeks into my first year of teaching German, so I kind of had to figure out a system on the fly.  Students would ask me at all sorts of random times during class if they could retake a particular assessment.  Since I only had two classes, it wasn't too bad trying to keep track of who was retaking what and when.  

But I knew that this past year when I moved up to two-thirds time with 4 classes, I would need a better system.  I wanted something that would help me keep track of all the paperwork and would push students to think about how they could prepare differently for an assessment to be more successful.  Sarah's Request to Retest Form (scroll down to the bottom of the post) gave me a starting point, and I developed this half-page form: 

Overall, it worked very well.  Once students turned in a retake form, I printed out a their quiz or test and stapled the form to it.  I kept them in a folder, organized by date of retake.  So, when I had a retake tutorial scheduled, I could just pull out the retakes for that day, and we were ready to go.

The one continuing frustration that I have with retakes is students who score worse on the retake than on the original assessment, or who only improve by a point or two.  I don't understand why students expect to earn a different grade when they haven't done something different to prepare.  This seems to me to be a huge waste of everyone's time.

Also, it drives me crazy when students show up for their retake and ask if they can study a bit right there before they retake.  I feel like this encourages cramming, which really only gets things into students' short-term memory, rather than into their long-term memory where we want the information to be.

My goal for next year is to make it more clear to students that retaking is a privilege and that they need to put in some work in order to earn the chance to retake.  So, my policy for next year will be that students must correct their original test or quiz before requesting a retake.  (For vocabulary quizzes, students will write each missed word five times.)  Hopefully, this will get students thinking about the mistakes they made prior to retaking the assessment.  And I hope it will eliminate some of the frivolous retaking where students just hope they will magically score better the second time around without putting in any additional work.  

Here is next year's retake form:

I reduced the size to a quarter of a page.  Since my school is going 1-1 this fall, I might be able to switch to an online form eventually, but for now I still need the paper to keep myself organized.  

Click on the pictures for an editable copy of the forms.