Reprinted from Connect
Vol.21 No.3, January/February, 2008
Focus on: Formative Assessment
Grade Level: Professional Development

Keeping It All Together

Technology for Learning

by Bob Coulter

One of the biggest challenges I have faced over the years in trying to manage formative assessment is the seemingly simple task of keeping all of my information together. All too often I have found that my insightful observation about a student was a distant memory before I started to pull thoughts together for a more formal evaluation. Twenty years ago when I was doing my teaching internship, I worked one semester with a teacher who maintained a large three-ring binder with pages of notes about each student. Later in the year, another teacher I worked with seemed to have an amazing capacity to remember and integrate observations about each child's abilities and disposition.

Alas, neither the repository nor the memory bank approach worked for me. The endless managing of a binder meant lugging it home every night and back to school the next morning, or staying after school to record notes. Quite often for project work, I ended up writing the same thing in each student's section. On the other end of the spectrum, my memory just isn't good enough to remember all of the kids all of the time. In particular, the quieter kids were the ones for whom I regularly found myself drawing a blank when it came time to synthesize what I knew about each student.

Help on the Web

My twenty-year grail questfirst as a full-time teacher and now in my role as mentor to a couple dozen teachersseems to have ended with the development of new (and free!) Web-based tools for managing all the intermittent pieces of information we need to hold on to if formative assessment is going to be useful.

The most significant addition to my professional tool belt in this regard is Highrise, a Web-based contact management tool from 37signals (http://www.37signals.com). While there are a plethora of address books, databases, and other software tools out there, Highrise has proven to be of particular value to me. Pragmatically, being Web-based means that I can access the information on each person from wherever I happen to be. Home, office, or even on the road (via my iPhone), I can check my notes or add to them almost instantly, whenever I need to. Even better, e-mails can be forwarded to a special e-mail address where the Highrise servers will add that information in that person's page. Imagine how much easier that can make your life, as you instantly file parent suggestions and observations along with all of your other information about that student. You can improve two-way communication as you list each student's parent contact and e-mail addresses on the sidebar for the student's page.

Powerful organizational tools

Aside from this simplicity, you can assign tags to your students, using a virtually unlimited number of categories that you create. These tags then let you quickly call up the students with that tag for a quick note. Imagine you've identified the kids in the Bluebird group as needing a quick refresher on adding with decimals. Within Highrise, click on the Bluebird tag to "grab" all of the group members. All of the kids' records with that tag will appear, lined up on the right side of the screen waiting for you to click on them. From here, simply type your observations once, copy them, and paste them into each student's record. While you're at it, create a to-do item reminding yourself to actually provide that refresher. Your to-do list is also in the sidebar on your screen.

I've found that the tags are a particularly powerful tool. Aside from organizational tags you might want to use (such as which period of the day you see that student), you can also create tags based on projects or personal interests. For example, you can easily create an "eagles" tag for the group tracking eagles through Journey North, and use that to quickly log observations about their work. Again, through copying and pasting, you can save yourself considerable time in recording information that is relevant to more than one student, even if you have to manually tweak exactly what you record about each student. This redundancy was one of the reasons I was never able to maintain my enthusiasm for manual record keeping such as the "big binder" approach.

Add multiple users

All of this data management capacity is available to you as a free product that imposes no time limit. If you want to go further, paid subscription options are available that add useful features. Two of the most powerful are the ability to add users and add files. If you team-teach, having accounts for each teacher feeding into a common set of observations can create a much more useful record of students' abilities, interests, and dispositions. Given that teachers almost never have time to talk about individual kids, this is a way you can literally compare notes on students for whom you share responsibility. Adding files simply provides a convenient way to store work samples or other relevant documents that are part of your ongoing assessment efforts.

While none of these tasks are impossible to do with paper-based tools, or with a software application installed directly on your computer, the flexibility of easy Web access and the grouping by tags has greatly improved my ability to manage information, to know what issues people are facing, and to plan the best next steps—all essential parts of making formative assessment a useful part of your professional practice. It's free and there is no commitment required. Give it a try!

GooToDo (http://www.gootodo.com): While I was skeptical about yet another "to-do list" at first and just gave it a quick try, it has now become a staple of my daily life. Unlike most lists that become overwhelming, GooToDo makes you focus on today's projects, though of course you can flip ahead or backwards as needed. What I find most useful, though, is the ability to forward e-mails to the list. Imagine you get an e-mail from the principal about a staff meeting next Tuesday, with an agenda attached. Forward the e-mail to Tuesday@gootodo.com and it will know it's from you (based on your e-mail address) and place it in your to-do list for Tuesday, complete with the attachment. When Tuesday comes around, it's there waiting for you.

Backpack (http://www.backpackit.com): This Web-based service from the developers of Highrise is just what you wish your students' backpacks were: A neat and organized way to store information, accessible to you from any browser. Need that information when you get home? Just open your Web browser, log in, and it's there. Individual pages can also be made public without sharing your entire backpack, which can be great for parent communication. Directions for your next major project can easily be posted there for review, saving you the trouble of sending home another paper (which will inevitably end up in the student's real backpack, never to be seen before June).

©2008 Synergy Learning, Inc. All rights reserved.

Bob Coulter - Bob Coulter is director of Mapping the Environment, a program at the Missouri Botanical Garden's Litzsinger Road Ecology Center that supports teachers' efforts to enhance their science curriculum through the use of the Internet and geographic information system (GIS) software. Previously, Bob taught elementary grades for 12 years.
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