"Pinteresting" Assessment Ideas

I'll admit that I waste spend a lot of time on Pinterest, and I especially enjoy perusing the "Education" section for classroom ideas.  I'm always adding to my "teaching" pins (I have 188 as of right now) but, sadly, I never remember to revisit them and try out the ideas in my classroom.  After looking through my pins again recently, I picked out two that I want to implement this year for sure. Coincidentally (or not), they are both related to assessments; specifically exit tickets. This is perfect for me actually as I have a terrible confession to make: I am an exit slip hoarder.  I am guilty of shoving stacks of these things into my class file organizer behind my desk and, despite my best intentions, that's where they would often stay for many days.  By the time I finally got around to assessing them, the data was old and way less useful than if I had assessed it right away. Since formative assessments are crucial to successful teaching because they keep your hand on the pulse of the day-to-day understanding that's happening in your classroom (or sometimes not happening), this is something that I have to get better at.  Hopefully these two Pinterest ideas will help me get started at improving myself in this area - and maybe they are something that you want to try out in your classroom, too! Please feel free to include any of your awesome exit slip ideas below in the comments section.

1. Exit Slip Bulletin Board:  This caught my eye because I feel like having a large display like the one pictured below would be beneficial in a number of ways.  Having that thing staring at me every day would hold me more accountable by acting as a constant reminder that I need to stay on top of my exit slips.  I also think it would create a presence in my room that would communicate to students that checking for understanding is an important part of learning.  I also really like how the students can rate the level of their understanding.  I'm big into student self-reflection and this would serve as a quick way to see who I need to revisit a particular concept with.

2. Twitter Exit Slips:  I found this on Pinterst, but it's actually a series of free templates from the Teachers Pay Teachers website. (I will include the link to the free download below.)  I think this might be a cool idea because it seems like a more engaging way to get students to participate in exit slips than the traditional piece of scratch paper that I would usually hand out.  I also think it would pose a healthy challenge for students to summarize their thinking in 140 characters or less. Including the hashtag is cool, too, because it challenges students to condense their ideas even further into a couple of words that categorize their summary.  I think this could work with just about any topic in any class.  For ELA, it could be used to assess students' understanding of characterization, theme, symbolism, etc.  And once I get into the swing of teaching "Humanties" instead of ELA this year, I'm sure I could use this in so many ways.  I'll be sure to post some examples once I try it out.

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Tweets-About-Todays-Lesson-A-Fun-Exit-Pass-To-Check-Student-Understanding-557462

It Begins...

Welcome to Middle School Momma!  As this is my first post, I thought I should introduce myself and my vision for this blog.  This will be my fifth year teaching middle school ELA (which will be turning into "Humanities" this year) and my first year as a mom.  Perfect time to start a blog, right?  Yikes!

My goal for this blog is that it can serve as a resource for both myself and other middle school teachers.  I envision it as a digital filing cabinet where I store awesome classroom ideas and resources as well as a journal where I house my thoughts and reflections about my teaching.  My hope is that it helps me to become a better teacher and also helps spark ideas for other middle school teachers to use in their practice.

I will try to update this thing as much as I can in between teaching, diaper changes, cleaning baby barfs, washing bottles, planning lessons, and grading papers.  Wish me luck - I'm sure going to need it!