Assessing a Small Village

I sometimes feel overwhelmed ... ok, most of the time I get a sense of being overwhelmed at assessing all our students at PHS, nearly 650 of them! It's our job to ensure that we continually assess our students for a variety of reasons - report cards, moving their learning forward, even to offer a glimpse of how my own teaching is being received.  I've been at this job for over a year (yes, not long!) but I'm finally starting to get a grasp of some innovative ways incorporate assessment into my lessons. The biggest challenge for me is the 30 minutes that I have with nearly 45-48 students (two classes). I'm trying to pack a lot into a short amount of time - movement, a lesson, practice, an activity, some assessment -  to name a few. 

This is what makes this job so fascinating some times, finding ways to make it easier for me and more exciting and challenging (in a good way) for our students. Now, I can't take credit for the work I've done with this idea. Though I did the leg work to get it going, the ideas came from the amazing group of #PhysEd teachers on Twitter and the North American Assessment Team (more on this soon!) from peplc.net.

What I Did

After figuring out what I wanted to assess in with the skills related to kicking and trapping, I created a Google Form. If you haven't experimented with Google Forms, they are one of my newest friends in the world of eduction!

The cool thing about Google Forms, for those new to them, is that they will automatically capture the information entered in a nice spreadsheet (half my work is done!). There is a lot more that can be done with 'conditional formatting' which I haven't explored yet, but plan to do so soon. I do know however that I can target some information on the spreadsheet and have certain colours appear. So if a low observation is entered, I can quickly identify areas of concern (for either the learner or me as a teacher). 

My next step was to create a QR Code for the URL of my live Google Form (I've used QR Codes before when teaching orienteering and hope to do the same this year expanding further into geocaching).  My QR Code is taped in the window of my office for easy access and I'm ready to go. 

The Process

Earlier I described my biggest challenge - 30 minute blocks with a lot of students and only one of me. I do have another teacher in the gym with me and this is looking like an effective way to utilize that teacher (there is a new teacher in the gym every 30 minutes). Now I have the ability to give the visiting teacher my iPad (or their own), scan the QR Code (no need to enter a URL) using a QR Code reader and they will be automatically directed to my observation form.

Already this has proved to be beneficial. In the past two days I've managed to capture more data than I have been able to in the past with the same amount of time. 

I hope that this quick explanation will be enough to get you interested in exploring Google Forms and QR Codes. If I've helped you in any way or you have a few questions please let me know by tweeting me, @ChrisFenMac, on twitter.

Thanks for reading!

-CFM