Assessment APP

When it comes to assessment, students would always have mixed feelings about it, and regard it as a burden. Because traditional assessments are always implemented through paper tests or exams. How can we motivate students to love assessment, and better express/exhibit themselves through effective assessment?! Kahoot is definitely a great and fun assessment tool to use when students are learning in class. It can functions as a formative assessment tool. Because in classrooms, we couldn’t read effectively a student’s body language to tell whether they have understood or not, so using a formative assessment tool is helpful for teacher to keep a track of their student’s progress. Kahoot could also use for surveys to gather opinions and insight. 

I chose Kahoot to use in my classroom because it cannot only assess the student during class, it could also function as a game. So that students would not felt it as a burden to perform, but rather with an excitement to play.

The first strength of Kahoot is interaction. Kahoot can realize multiple screen interactions. Teacher could design quizzes according to the lesson content before the class, and input the questions into Kahoot. Every student could connect to the teacher’s “Kahoot assessment game” through his or her mobile phone. They could compete to answer as many questions as possible to accumulate points and win the game. From Kahoot, teacher could get students’ response, accuracy rate and ranks instantly.

For example, if I want to do a math lesson formative assessment in my class. I would click the purple"Quiz" button to create a new Kahoot game. A new window with game title and description would pop up. After i fill in the title, description, I could upload a cover image to make this Kahoot standout. I chose it to be visible to everyone, so that every student could see it. After i fill out the info,  I click "ok, go".

It would leads me to another window that I can add in my quiz questions: 1. Katie has 22 plums, Jessica has 7 plums, how many plums do Katie and Jessica have in total? In the option session, I would give out 4 choices, with one correct, I would tick that one, and proceed to next question.

After I input all the quiz questions, I click "Save"

Then it's published and ready to play. After I click "Play", it would appear two ways to play, either player VS player on 1:1 devices; or team VS team on shared devices. I chose team VS team so that students could form groups to play, it would foster their teamwork spirit, and it requires less devices.

I would send to each team the website to assess the game: https://kahoot.it , after they click the website, then type in the game pin: 241150, they would enter into the game surface, and choose a name for their team, and the nick names of the team members.

The game starts, with a count down of 20 seconds on the screen, team 1 has to choose one 1 out of 4 answers.

When time is up, the rank would appear instantly, showing which team has won the game. After the game, students could give ratings, feelings and comments on the game.If they are not satisfied, they could play again.

By the end of the game, the teacher would already know the progress of each team, how much do they know and what areas need to be improved. It's also very user friendly, we only need to have a tablet, computer or mobile phone to start the game. The instruction is simple and easy to follow. Only problem that could arise is that if there's internet problem, students could not access to the game effectively. I would make sure to use it in a good internet connection classroom. Otherwise, prepare several mobile phones with unlimited internet connections. Some students might feel unfamiliar with this online game and quiz and perform slow, however, with more practice, they would definitely fall in love with this game.

Students as Global Citizens

Think
One of the most important characteristics of a global citizen is how he/she thinks. Because most of our actions stems from how and what we think. If we think as a global citizen, we would certainly do the things that a global citizen does. Therefore, the first thing I want to teach my students is to think outside the box, or even as if there is no box. Integrating an international perspective into the curriculum, so that they would not be narrow-minded.

To think outside the box, we have to first open the box that we usually live in-- Introducing an outside world to the classroom in a vivid and tangible way. Each week, we would have a theme country to study about their culture, learn the local music, and facts. In the morning, we would play and teach a music from that country, and let the students sing together. For example, if the theme country is Spain, we would learn a popular Spanish song, and learn a short Flamenco dance from a video or a dance teacher.

Actions
I would use EPALS to connect to a classroom in Spain, and set up a skype or zoom video conference with the teacher and students in that classroom. I would introduce myself and my class to my ePals, create either a video or text introduction telling them where we are from and some things about our class and community. Students in the class could also participate in the introduction and video conference. After introduce to each other, we would see in what ways are these two classes differ from each other? Share our thoughts by replying to our partner's post or video questions.

By the "filters" function, we could choose a country, student age range and language spoken that we want to connect. I chose "Spain", and then the classroom teachers from Spain popped up. After choosing for a classroom that we want to connect and partner with, we would start a journey of exploring another culture.

Week one would be music, week two is food.  In the "Explore collaborations" section of the website, we could have culture exchange with our partner class. We would exchange traditional recipes with our partner class; analyze how recipes can reflect geography and culture. By looking closely at the ingredients, cooking tools and directions of a local recipe, we could discover a lot about the country and culture it comes from. I would invite students to share their ideas and questions about the recipe; I would lead them to think about these questions: what do the ingredients reveal about the partner class's location or climate? What do the preparation techniques and tools say about partner class's geography or culture? What cultural traditions does this food reflect? In the end, I would give students the homework to make and taste a recipe provided by our ePals, and a collaboration project to combine recipes to create a cookbook and discover firsthand what's different and good about their cultural cuisines!

Week three is history. We would share with each other about important historic sites, structures or landmarks from our own country. I would ask students to identify 3 different types of historic places to share with our partner class, and they normally would share with us their historic sites as well. Students are asked to create a presentation with Prezi or Powerpoint to introduce the place they have chosen to their partner class.

Week four, students will exchange folktales of their own country with each other. After one month study of different features of a foreign country, students' horizon has been broadened, they could learn to appreciate another culture and language, and they were able to talk and interact with students of the same age from that country. They could even further develop deeper friendship with our partner class's students by writing emails or snail mails to learn more about each other. Maybe one day travel to that country to visit their pen-pals!

The problem with this Global citizens class is that the connection to some classroom might not as effective as we thought, some partner teachers might not be as responsive and cooperative. I think it's better for the teacher to plan ahead, and connect to several classrooms in advance, and choose one that response well and establish a stable connection and partnership with that partner classroom. With the great distance in between two classrooms, students' responsiveness might also be an issue of concern. Teacher could take some time to encourage students to reach out and make a penpal and write to a student friend before and after class. That way when they are seeing each other through online classroom, they would feel more familiar and easy to talk with with their already established friendship.

App for Students as Researchers

From the word “research” we can tell that it literally means “re”+”search”, i.e., search repeatedly for an issue or topic that you want to know the truth behind. The first thing a researcher does is to find out a question you want to repeatedly search about, that comes from brainstorming many ideas and problems, and identify a question that you think is worthy of researching. Albert Einstein asked a very simple questions "what is time?" and by looking for answers to it, he developed the theory of relativity. All great researches start from a simple questions.

In many classes, teacher does most of the talking, there’s not much time for students to brainstorm their own questions, using Quora is a great way to help students to build up a habit of asking questions and they could get answers much faster and get more answers than asking in class.  Students can not only use Quora to get answers that they want; they could also contribute answers to other people’s questions. So Quora can be used to both solve an unanswered question or start a conversation about an interesting topic. From one question, Quora could gradually build up a community to post and answer questions about anything of their choice to gain collective knowledge. It’s a great tool for a student’s daily researching needs. For example, I'm interested in these topics: cooking, education, publishing, healthy eating, so i could follow these topics on Quora. Under these topics, it shows there are millions of followers.

And when I click one topic, for example, "education", it leads me to the education topic community where many questions about "education" were asked and answered. These questions could promote more thinking and questioning.

I've tried to asked a question"How do I improve efficiency in study life?",  I have also requested some experts on this field to reply me. As shown in the picture below, after i pose the question, the page would take me to a window with several experts on this field for me to request their answer, by clicking the "+" sign, it becomes "V” sign, which means the request has been sent to the expert.I could also target my question to specific Quora users; and I can spend credits to get my questions in front of more people. The Quora community would vote on which answers are most helpful.

After I posted a question,  within an hour, I got several answers.

The answers that I got is actually quite deep and professional, I'm very satisfied with these answers! Since many other people could also see my questions, if they are interested, they could also follow my question, and see the answers. 

Many children are curious and love to ask many questions, but if their questions are not being responded in a timely manner, they would gradually ask less and less, and lost the habit of asking questions. So it's of utmost importance to build an environment that encourages them to ask questions, and get answers. When a child is good at asking questions, they are already on the first step of being a researcher. And the benefit of getting many different answers from different people all over the world would broaden the student's horizon. They would not automatically believe in one teacher's answer, but rather, they could compare different answers, think and process the answers to form their own judgement and opinions. It trains their critical thinking.

In my future classroom, I would design a research lesson for student to do independent research. I will teach them about Quora, and require them to ask and find answers from it. They could write about the process of their research, from a single question to a web of answers from different people and countries. Some answers are from the experts in that field, students could browse the expert's background and get more of their articles to read.Finally, they could synthesise and analyse the answers and information they got, and form their own opinion on this field.

The danger of Quora is that some academic questions might not get very reliable and valid answers from people, students sometimes would feel confused to see so many different views and answers on one topic,particularly some controversial issues. However, that's part of training their own critical thinking, teachers at this time could give them guidance in discernment.  They will have to research more about the background of the respondent, etc. The pro is that for some questions, you could get a firsthand data from the person who actually have experienced it, such as "how is the pollution in Beijing? How does it affect your life?" you could possibly get answers from people who actually live there, and provide you their firsthand experience.

Scribe APP

 The first and most frequent use of Day One is for writing diary. It has a setting to give daily push notifications to remind the user—it’s time to write your journal. This picture below shows the user has set the notification to remind user every day at 20:25 to write journal.

We don’t necessarily have to write something upon notification, however using Day One regularly would help us form a conditioned response to reflect about the day and what had happened that worth keeping a record. Students normally need this kind of training to form a habit of writing. Many students have a passive learning style in the classroom I used to observe, which is listening to lectures from the teacher only, they lack time for self-reflection. Keeping journalling and scribing in class helps them to express their thoughts and ideas through writing. 

Using Day One will help a student to form a habit of collecting. We could create different tags to keep a specific category of items. Such as school notes(different subjects), food recipe, reflection to books, and reflection to films, etc. This can be instantly recorded through mobile version of Day One, and it can sync on any other devices online, such as computer, tablet, webpage. If student has some good ideas, it's most effective when jot down immediately to keep the idea fresh and solid, after a while, people forget easily. So Day One mobile version can also helps to catch moment of inspiration. Collect and arrange different ideas and thoughts. 

In the classroom, students can scribe the lecture, and share it with others through mail, messages, twitter, facebook or linkin etc. As time goes by, this would become a valuable student legacy. Student's relationship to the knowledge has become the real owner of knowledge rather than passive receiver.

Day One is cloud based, it can store information for as long as you want, the cost is $39.99.  It could be used for as long as you want. Day One also could geotags your entries with your current location and makes a note of the current weather, you can tag your current activity status (such as walking, running, flying, etc.), and you can export all your entries as plain text or PDF or HTML. Moreover, you can also tag your entries for better organisation, and you can star certain entries to mark them as being extra special or important. On the iPhone, Day One logs your current activity status, and the Mac version has a terrific map view.

Some other added benefits of keep DayOne journaling is that it's good for one's psychological well being and physiological functioning. Some researchers, for example, have shown that people who journal reports having significantly less distress, feel less depressed, and have an overall better mood. Therefore, I would highly recommend my students to use this journaling APP to practice writing, if necessary I would also give a lesson to teach them how to use it.

Concerning the integration of Day One into classroom, it would take a lot of planning and organising, however the long term effect is very rewarding and worthwhile. The danger of this APP is that students might have some difficulty to express themselves deeply through this new software, however, with practice and teacher's encouragement, they will gradually get the happiness of journaling with this convenient way. They could basically write wherever they go, it takes off the burden of carrying a diary book or pen that increases the weight of student's bags.