Ozga's Blog

Assessment! Assessment! Assessment! This is sometimes what I think and feel when the word assessment is said. I find this topic such an interesting one because so much of our profession relies on assessment, yet most teachers find its an area they need the most professional development in. The assignment that required us to create a student assessment plan was a fun one for me. I enjoyed this assignment because it is an area I struggle with as an educator. Why is that? I personal philosophy sometimes gets the better of me and hinders giving assessments more in my content area. Physical Education assessment a lot of times is more of a visual interpretation of a skill that is assessed. This course has allowed my to make more specific rubrics that give students a clear and concise reason they earn the grade on an assessment. Now the fun part of this student assessment plan is that I will 100% use it this year! Even though we always have a to-do list for our school work, sometimes the m...

The theme of the two artifacts I am going to reflect on is useful material outside of University of St. Francis. When I can learn something to better myself outside of the course it automatically has an impact on me. My PE department will have a guide to how to improve our professional development meetings thanks to my first artifact . Having to be openly honest about the struggles that are involved with department production was difficult. On the other hand, maybe this is an exercise that my department needs to do together to start becoming more productive. I also think the format that I created for this half day meeting could be another positive thing to get the department moving in the right direction. That is the definition of taking an assignment from a USF class and applying it at another level. I'll keep my devoted blog followers updated on the dept meetings moving forward! Disclaimer: these are not really passwords I use in real life! The ten passwords I made up were t...

My growth as a digital citizen has been huge because of the class EEND678Y. I have continually challenged myself in becoming a better educator and what a better way to do this then using my resources online. I have joined Twitter and have learned what people to follow because they have great tweets. The tweets most of the time are of students during lessons of new games or skill concepts. I have used some of them in my classes and this is a great way to network with other educators. Not only has this helped me on Twitter, but I was able to communicate with a teacher from DeKalb, IL to present at our district PE teachers. This was well received because sometimes administration forgets about PE people and what we want for professional development. Another way this class grew me was my personal hack on my passwords. The applied digital skills module had me do a Google tutorial on passwords. There I created 10 passwords that I normally use for everyday accounts online. After importing co...

The History of Grades The article that really talked to me was the one provided  here . The reason this was such a remarkable article was because I felt like I was taking a step back in time to my schooling. In this article the most important concept I took away from it was that grades take away "real" learning in the educational system. Grades were developed in the industrial era and were compared to grading shoes in the assembly line. I too felt that grades were not the biggest predictor of my learning in school. I had a great realationship with all my teachers but one thing that seemed to contradict this was my grades. I was a B student who had trouble taking tests because my memory was not great. In this article it talks about rote memorization as not predicting success after school. I was worried because when I read things in high school I had a hard time remember them for the test. Even the ACT was not something I performed well on. Enough talking about me and my sc...