Sunday, June 8, 2014

EDUC7726 Week 10 - Soapbox Hangout

Week 10 - Soapbox Hang-out

This week's assignment in EDUC 7726 - Teaching, Learning and Assessing in the Digital Era, we were given a list of topics to discuss that we had not necessarily touched upon in depth through-out the course. We were to chose one of interest or another topic of our liking and present as a soapbox performance, so to speak. I found this assignment to be of my liking and it was a way for my classmates and I to learn more about various areas of Teaching, Learning, and Assessing in the Digital Era. As usual everyone's topic was engaging, informative and filled with useful knowledge & resources.  

My topic was, "If students have the information at their fingertips, what are the right questions to ask?". My thinking on this was to research and discuss what types of questions should be be asked in informal assessments as well in formal assessments. I began by discussing questioning in terms of teaching and learning and then went into some interesting facts about teacher questioning. 

I read a lot of articles by Will Richardson, parent, educator, speaker, author, and 12 year blogger at weblogg-ed. Richardson, a critic of standardized testing and pro-project based learning educator has a lot to say about the state of our teaching and learning and how educators need to adjust their thinking in terms of unlearning. He discusses the 3 things teachers need to unlearn and they are: Delivery, Competition, and Assessment. 

I then gave examples of good questioning in the content areas of both math and language arts. I included and briefly discussed the relevance of teachers knowing the questioning taxonomies such as Bloom's. Also included was a more modern day version of Bloom's Taxonomy and within the pyramid the technology that can support those higher level thinking questions.

Overall this was a great assignment and an enlightening experience for me as I learned more about questioning in teaching and learning as well as so much more information from the other soapbox presentations. For a glimpse at my powerpoint presentaion click here.




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