Thing 12 - Assessment/Evaluation and Survey Tools

For this thing we first looked at Survey tools like google forms and survey monkey. I have been on the receiving end of both of these tools and I have found them very easy to follow and fill out. We use the google forms very often in our district when our administration would like to get a feel for where the staff stand on various items. I had never created a form myself until the quiz for thing 9, so now that I have used it twice I can see that they are very easy to set up and send out. I believe that I will be able to use this tool a lot next year to survey the students and parents. I will be great to get feedback from both parties to see what is going well and where the area of improvement need to focus. I have started by creating a form to send out to the parents about volunteering during the school year. I am hoping this will help get our parents a little more involved.

Another tool that we explored was Rubistar. This is an online rubric creator. This site was great! I was not sure what they would have available for a band teacher, but they had a lot of options. I was also to create a rubric for a playing test. I give out many playing tests throughout the year and with this I can create a specific rubric for each exercise instead of using a generic one that does not always fit the situation. Here is a sample:

We also looked at different data tools and explored what our schools have to offer. In my district we use power school as our  students information system. I really like this system. We use it for attendance, grades and discipline records as well. It is nice to have all of the information in one place. You always know where to look. We are also piloting DiscoveryEd right now. For me this tool is not very useful, but I do see the advantages for the other classroom teachers. They can test the students and get immediate feedback on the students and the questions they asked. These are the two main tools used at our middle school.