Chatting about Tech Ed

Formative assessment is a teaching method that involves the instructor evaluating, in an informal or formal manner, a student's comprehension of the lesson during the learning process.  According to the this week's resources some teacher's can give an assessment before the chapter is started to diagnose where the instruction in the lesson should be focused.  Assessments can be given in the middle of the lesson to see if the students are keeping up or misunderstanding the concepts or afterwards showing if additional help is needed or which students need extra instruction. I haven't seen much of formative assessment in the classroom that was done through technology.  One or two of my kids' teacher's did formative assessments particularly in math but it seemed like a lot of work as the teacher would use paper and pencil assessments and it seemed like the students were assessed quite a lot compared to instruction time.  The advantages of an easy to use app would...

Some times I feel like I am the last one to know when there is something new happening, for the good or for the bad.  After going through the assigned videos/articles on the flipped classroom I finally understand what my high school son is talking about!  My son is a senior now and he has been complaining for years that the teachers at his private high school have decided to no longer teach.  The private school is a STEM school, aiming at enhancing education through science, technology, engineering and math.  However, I have long since been aware that my son can "color" his school experience into a loosely interpreted novel-turned movie.  His explanation of a flipped classroom made me think that the teachers just assigned videos, walked in the classroom, assigned homework and just checked out. However that is not the case at all and now I finally understand what has happened, and it actually seems smart to flip the classroom.  Using the time in the clas...