The Scientific Teacher

Over my years of teaching I’ve probably used Google image search about 10,000 times. I like to create a lot of my assessments and worksheets from scratch, so I’m constantly searching for that perfect photo or piece of clip art to illustrate something. But as others in the bloggossphere like Dan Meyer have pointed out, using hokey clip art in this age of giga-pixelated multimedia is inexcusable. Using videos in the place of clip art leverages the engaging and real-world qualities of a video clip, and encourages students to see the science in real life. So, this year I’m going to experiment with video assessments. The idea behind a video assessment is that students will watch a video and then explain it demonstrating their scientific understanding (as a side note- videos could also be used to great effect for introducing a new concept, or could even be made by  students themselves to demonstrate understanding- but this is for another post!).

The inspiration for this came from Greg Schwanbeck and his post on dy/dan a couple weeks ago. In the comment thread one of the teachers asked about the logistics of doing a video assessment in the classroom, and it is a little tricky. After all, you want students to be able to watch the video at their own leisure, and go back to a certain part if they want. Anyway, I gave this some thought, and I’ll share with you my prototype Video Assessment 1.0 for your critique: click here to check it out.

The assessment is admittedly simple- I’m just reworking a pre-assessment that I give to my second graders at the beginning of their unit on Forces and Motion. What I’m looking for as a teacher is to see whether they can identify the kinds of pushes and pulls acting in each video, and whether they are familiar with their scientific names (friction, gravity, etc), and any misconceptions they hold. I would also like to include a clip with magnetic force, but try as I might I couldn’t find a good one, so I’ll probably just have to film one myself.

The webpage for the assessment was made using GoogleSites, which allowed me to embed the questions from a GoogleForm that I created (both of these Google tools are free, and I highly recommend using GoogleDocs if you aren’t already). There is an option to embed videos from YouTube directly, but because I wanted to resize the videos to make them fit together tightly on the page, I first ripped them from YouTube using this website and then uploaded them to GoogleDocs in the GoogleVideo format, which lets you resize them.

The cool thing about using GoogleForms for an assessment like this is that when students click “Submit”, their responses are automatically collected in a spreadsheet for you. I work with seven 2nd grade classes at my school, so this is a very seamless way to collect a lot of data. All I’ll need to do is simply send the link of the assessment webpage to teachers so they can share with their students. By using laptop carts and headphones, each student will get their own laptop so they can do the assessment on their own and watch the videos as many times as they need.

One design issue I have is that I would prefer to place each video directly next to the question, but GoogleForms doesn’t allow for embedding videos. So students will have to do a lot of scrolling up and down between watching videos and answering questions. Anyway, we’ll see how it goes down- but in the meantime I would appreciate any constructive criticism you have.