Tip #4- Make Full Use of the iPad as a Formative Assessment Tool

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Tip #4 for a Successful 1:1 iPad Implementation is make full use of the iPad as a formative assessment tool. Research from John Hattie (Visible Learning, 2008) points to overwhelming effectiveness that meaningful feedback helps students be more successful and helps teachers better inform future instruction.  Helping teachers understand the multiple ways to use the iPad as an efficient tool to provide formative assessments is a great way to increase effective use of 1:1 devices in schools. Using tools like Google Forms, Socrative, and Padlet (Wallwisher), Kahoot, Poll Everywhere, and many others, teachers are able to collect real time feedback about student understanding and then customize instruction based on that feedback. Teachers continually find innovative ways to provide feedback to the student work in ways that are faster and more efficient than collecting paper, such as using Schoology and TurnItIn to annotate students' assignments and even provide audio feedback.

Before 1:1 iPads, teachers had to rely on quizzes or paper exit slips that were time-consuming to evaluate, which meant that meaningful feedback to students was often delayed by a day or more.  The iPad has been the tool that provides access for students to complete this feedback before, during, and after class. After 1:1 iPads, quizzes and exit polls can be instantly assessed and then used to inform teaching that day or the next.  Plus, all students’ voices can be heard and accounted for when an electronic collection tool is used.  Compared to the traditional method of having students raise their hands to speak and only hearing from one or two individuals, the increased accountability placed on each student and the knowledge gain for the teacher about each of their students is invaluable.

An easy, quick way to get teachers started with simple, electronic formative assessment is to have them make a short three question Google Form with a field for students’ names, a question where students select their hour of class (if the teacher has multiple sections of the same course) and a text box that simply asks, “What is your answer?”  This form can be used repeatedly throughout a class daily to gather the responses of students to any question asked, whether the prompt is displayed on a screen, written on the board, or just stated aloud. There is no need for the teacher to continually edit the form and change the text of the question.  To further speed up the ease of having students open this form up, teachers can have students open the link to the form in Safari, then simply add the page as an icon app to their home screen and title it appropriately, such as “Science Form.”

Here's another great example of using the iPad for formative assessment: teachers can give more immediate feedback to students' topic sentences or thesis statements by collecting them via a Google form, then use FormEmailer to add comments and email them to the student.  This allows the teacher to provide customized feedback to students in an efficient paperless environment. Some teachers have also collected these statements or other items such as lab results or short answers to questions on a collective Google spreadsheet, which has the added benefit of being seen by everyone. The feedback doesn't have to come from just the teacher, either, allowing for more input and reflection by all students, rather than just between one student and the teacher.

There are many other ways to efficiently give more formative assessments and feedback in class and even save time grading.  Besides apps like Socrative, Minnetonka teachers also use Skyward and Schoology assessments online and use the automatically scored multiple choice, matching and true/false items to guide teaching and learning. These testing features even allow for inserted pictures, open-ended responses, randomized questions and teacher comments on student responses. The Schoology app as well as TurnItIn both provide the teacher with an easy, efficient way to annotate students' assignments and even provide audio feedback, all without paper. Getting teachers to harness any or all of these great tools on an iPad is a great way to increase the effectiveness of your 1:1 program.

To learn more about Minnetonka Public Schools iPad Program, check out tinyurl.com/iPadTonka

Tenth Annual Minnetonka Technology Site Visit a Success!

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Watch a video overview

Last week, 150 educators from the Midwest toured Minnetonka Public Schools to see how teachers accelerate learning with technology.  They had the opportunity to see technology integration firsthand in PreK-12 grade classrooms, witness proven programs, and gather innovative ideas from our teachers, administrators, students, and technology staff to take back to their own school. The full program agenda is like a digital treasure chest of links to all of the resources, handouts, and presentations from event.  I'd encourage you to look through it!  You will likely find all sorts of valuable information that you can use even if you weren't on site.  You can also search #TonkaTech on Twitter.

Some photos of visitors touring Minnetonka classrooms.  See more. 

Wednesday, March 4, was our tour day.  Visitors chose two of four school tours, seeing one in the morning and the other in the afternoon.  They werwe able to explore technology in all subject areas, including Chinese and Spanish Language immersion, early childhood, special education, Tonka Online, Tonka<codes>, and the arts.  At the secondary level, they experienced Minnetonka's digital learning cycle for a 1:1 iPad program (recognized as a 2013-15 Apple Distinguished Program) and also toured our Vantage facilities. Classroom visits and mini-sessions provided direct interaction with teachers and students.  We bused visitors between sites and enjoyed a lunch all together during which our Superintendent and Executive Director of Technology spoke.  Sponsors helped cover the costs and and provided some nice raffle prizes for attendees.  Check out the full program agenda, including details about each classroom stop.

On Thursday, March 5, visitors took an in depth dive into the behind the scenes details, spending the day attending a wide variety of small group sessions led by Minnetonka instructional technology staff, teacher leaders, District administrators, and Technology Department staff to learn how things work behind the scenes, from the planning to the professional development.  We shared the best practices and tips and tricks we have learned for implementing meaningful technology integration that will accelerate learning.  The morning keynote, Minnetonka Innovates, was given by Assistant Superintendent Eric Schneider, and provided visitors with an overview of how Minnetonka's crowd-sourced, grassroots innovation process works and keeps us continually improving.  Be sure to look through the full program agenda to access all of the presentations and content from each breakout session.  Over lunch attendees were with District staff members for Q & A.  Once again, sponsors helped cover the costs and and provided some nice raffle prizes for attendees.  

Fourth Annual Summer Technology Institute June 17-18

I hope you will recruit your staff to present at and attend our Fourth Annual Summer Technology Institute June 17-18, as well at the entire week of learning June 15-18 at our Summer Leadership Institute.  Thomas Murray, Digital Learning Director at Alliance for Excellent Education and founder of #EdTechChat, will keynote on June 18.  Greg Kulowiec and Beth Holland from EdTechTeacher will lead AppSmashing and Elementary iPad workshops on June 17 and breakout sessions on June 18.  Minnesota TIES staff will also lead preconference and breakout sessions, plus all the other presenters and attendees will make this year’s conference a great event!  The conference will encompass all ed tech- Google, Schoology, Chromebooks, Moodle, iPads, and much more!  Register today!

Minnetonka's Technology Belief Statements

Our Instructional Technology Staff, Secondary Principals and Media Specialists, Director of Technology and Assistant Superintendent for Instruction spent a day together last spring reviewing our iPad program and planning for the future. This day turned out to be extremely valuable. If we hadn't scheduled the time to make it happen, I'm sure we wouldn't have been able to carve out the time to get as much done during our monthly meeting of 90 minutes. Having a whole day to focus on our secondary iPad 1:1 implementation with extended time to talk through our next steps allowed us to reflectively take a philosophical look at things.  

One of the results of this time was the drafting of our belief statements below. I am fortunate to work with some excellent writers who did a wonderful job crafting each of these statements. We discussed and fine tuned these and found the process to be extremely beneficial. These have helped us to decide how to focus our energies and efforts in our use of instructional technology. We have continued to revisit these statements throughout this school year. We welcome your ideas and thoughts about these belief statements. I would also encourage you to go through a similar process with your own team:

Minnetonka’s instructional model is built on the Charlotte Danielson framework and includes, among other key instructional strategies, an emphasis on the integration of personal technologies in the classroom.  The following set of beliefs represents the District’s vision for this integration.

1. We believe...effective use of technology will lead to the development of learners who approach problems more creatively, think more critically, collaborate more skillfully, and communicate with higher levels of precision.

2. We believe…high-level utilization of personal technologies is the new expectation for our students’ preparedness and success in higher education, careers, and life.

3. We believe...technology should be integrated in classrooms in the service of learning, not as an end in itself, and that effective utilization in the classroom makes the device virtually invisible.

4. We believe...effective use of technology leads to higher levels of personalized learning for both students and for teachers, and includes a sense of empathy for all stakeholders as well as human-centered design.

5. We believe...effective use of technology leads to increased efficiencies of time and resources (paperless classrooms, crowdsourcing, collaborative tools, etc.)

6. We believe...teaching with personal technologies creates a more student-centered and differentiated learning environment while also dramatically increasing the potential for real-time or just-in-time learning.  

7. We believe...fluency with current personal technologies is directly related to success with future technological developments.

8. We believe...it is our moral obligation to transform our current instructional practices to align with our stated belief that our students’ future success will depend on their ability to harness new and emerging technologies.

9. We believe...effective management of a digital environment requires a proactive approach to digital citizenship as well as regular communication and feedback on the user experience within that environment.

10. We believe...leaders must model effective use of the personal technologies that teachers are using in the classroom and should be transparent about their leadership journey.

11. We believe...teacher-leadership in the area of technology integration is an essential element of our collective success and efficacy.

Great 1:1 Program Evaluation Questions for Student, Parent, and Teacher Surveys

It's that time of the school year when educators are looking to evaluate their 1:1 programs.  I've had three requests in the just past two weeks to share the surveys we've developed and used.  I figured sharing these here could be valuable for others, too.  Feedback has always been and will continue to be an important part of our project as we study the impact of this initiative.   We continue to work intensively with our teachers as they learn to integrate iPads into the curriculum, and this input helps to shape our training. 

I just launched our annual iPad Program and Technology survey last week for the fourth year, seeking input and feedback from our 4,500 iPad students in grades 7-12, their families, and their teachers in preparation for late February and March reports to the School Board.  

Over the years, we have found that iPads increase student engagement, collaboration, communication, organization and efficiency, better individualize instruction, provide real-time feedback, and increase 21st century skills like problem solving and critical thinking. You can look through past School Board presentations on this master list of our iPad program resources at tinyurl.com/iPadTonka.  The links to past Board presentations include PowerPoints with graphs of the results to the past three years of our survey questions. The results of this year's survey will be posted in March 2015.  

Below are links to copies of the surveys we used last year.  Initially we asked more questions four years ago and we have cut out some over years.  Since the first semester of our first year of the program had half the students/parents/teachers without iPads, we asked both groups the same questions multiple times in year one and made some notes of the differences between them.  You can see these differences in Board Reports from our first year of one to one iPads.  Now instead of surveying the groups two or three times during the school year, I now just do it once.  (We’ve noticed some survey fatigue…)

• Student survey
• Parent survey 
• Teacher survey

If you'd be willing to share your survey questions for program evaluation, I'd appreciate it!