My Personal Digital Foot Print, And How to Help My Students With Theirs

If you google Nicole Terry, you first get a small banner of pictures of what I am assuming are "Nicole Terrys" but none are me. As you go down the list, the next post is a list of the "Nicole Terrys" on Facebook, a website of essays written by a Nicole Terry (not me), and then a list of "Nicole Terrys" on LinkedIn. Then another website that is not me, two youtube channels, not me again, and then, finally, my twitter account.

So if people just googled my name on the first page, you will find my twitter account. I am looking for myself "incognito" on google chrome, so it is as if a stranger is looking for me. On my twitter you will find silly quotes, my dogs, my cat, things about FFA, and things about education. No cussing, inappropriate pictures, or bashing of other people on there.

My Nicole Terry Facebook, I am not even one of the top searches anywhere. My Facebook is private, and only for my family and friends. Nothing on there is inappropriate by any means, but I did have it since high school, and like most high school students I would post moody things.

I have an app on my iPhone called TimeHop, and everyday it sends me the tweets and Facebook posts I posted in the past on that day. When I first got it, it was really fun. I saw my old posts on dog shows I won, pictures of old friends, really neat to sit there and take in some memories. Then I started getting posts from when I was a teenager. I never did anything that could get me in trouble, but I didn't post the kindest thing either. There was one post from when my parents were getting divorced, and I was angry with my mother, I wrote a paragraph about "what a mother was" and "how mine did not live up to those expectations" as my Facebook status. Now, I will never take away how I felt, but it really wasn't something I should have posted. Looking at my friends list at that time, would have I have told that to some of those people in person? No, so why did I post it for them to read online?

I read stories all the time of young teenagers losing friends, scholarships, getting kicked off of sports teams, suspended, and even expelled from post they have made online. I am lucky that, never posted things that cause that too me, but I did make mistakes.

The new school I am moving too is not one to one yet, but will be in a few years. Even though I am an agriculture teacher, I will share my online experiences with my students. I will stress, "if you don't want that audience to see it, then don't post it."

After taking some time googling myself and adding my town and college to the search, I can only find my twitter, LinkedIn, things I was involved in at Purdue, and some results from the dog shows. They only thing I can really be embarrassed about are some of my placings at the dog shows. :)

Curated Resources - Do you Symbaloo?

With all of these resources popping up everywhere, sometimes it is hard to keep up. Before I would rely on Google Chrome telling me what sites I was on in the past, but searching through your history is time consuming.

I have lost resources because I forgot all about them. In February, the eLearning specialist at my school had a challenge where we were to make a Symbaloo for one of our classes. I started one, and fell in love with it.

I have Symbaloo pages for all of my classes now. I also made a teacher page for myself. Every time I find a new tech tool I like, I add a tile to my Symbaloo page. They are all there, along with my professional development links as well. You can find mine at https://www.symbaloo.com/mix/teacherpage6. Other teachers, and companies create Symbaloos and share them with others.

 How Symbaloo works is that you just create a "tile" but copying and pasting a link in it. You can customize it by adding pictures and names to the tiles. Students can make their own as well when doing research.

Symbaloo is my homepage, it should be for every teacher.

Authentic Assessment

Authentic assessment is not just a test. In life after high school (and college for some), how many multiple choice tests does a person come across? What about true/false? None. Why do we test students knowledge this way then? When is a student going to be asked "Who was the 16th president of the United States?" in the real world? Now taking an analyzes of how the decisions of that president affected our country, that is something students can use in life.

Authentic assessment is testing the students on their skills, rather than just their knowledge. Theses assessments are more relevant than just a test to students.

Can authentic assessment be used in any subject area? My answer is yes. Every subject area has standards that promotes higher order thinking in students. Key words like "demonstrate", "create",  "evaluate", and "analyze" are actions that cannot be written on a multiple choice test.

Here are some examples of authentic assessments I have came up with for various subject areas:

• English: Have students write a letter in a form of a five paragraph essay on how they deserve something (a game, new puppy, award, etc.) This is authentic assessment, because they will have to evaluate themselves, analyzing their target audience, and create an argument for their purposes. This is real world application as well. I breed dogs, and if a potential puppy buyer cannot email me using proper grammar and sentence structure, or not be able to communicate with me in writing, I will not sell them a dog.

• History/Social Studies: Speaking to people not in education, most believe this subject area is useless. It angers me, because it is not just about the facts of history. It is what we do with those facts. In this subject area you can have students analyze the past, and see if it will happen in the future. Students can study what past presidents political platforms were, and compare them to the political platforms people are running for today. Students can ask questions in this subject area and make predictions on current events.

• Math: We do math everyday. We all spent money! Students can calculate spending, make charts of what they spend money on, and calculate interest. If that isn't relevant to students, I don't know what is.

Other subject areas like science, health, art, music, and the vocational areas all have "hands on" activities for students. Most of these activities have rubric for mastery.

I teach high school, I am used to teenagers when it comes to evaluating them. In high school and middle school, I believe these students can demonstrate mastery, based on my examples above. I struggle when it comes to the elementary level. I rarely ever work with these students, but I believe they can demonstrate mastery in subjects. We had a mini-economy in my elementary school. We were to create shops, pay "rent" for our booths, make something, and sell it to other students. We would then see if we made money, or lost money. I think examples like this show that authentic assessment works in the elementary grades as well.

The last question "Is it practical to ask teachers to complete these types of activities in the current, high stakes testing environment? YES! Why would we not? If a student can think critically, they can conquer those tests. If we have them analyze text already in class, or make calculations in real world settings, they can relay those skills on to a test. Most of the standardized tests are moving towards higher order thinking skills. If we expect those in our classes, they can apply them too the test.

Why should we teach students towards a test, when we should be teaching them towards the world they will be living in anyways?