Kahoot, Fortnite, and Interpretive Tasks

Hola Hola:

I am in a much happier place than I was in my last post! Most of my additional responsibilities have ended, which is B.E.A.U.T.I.F.U.L.

As a result, this post is a wee bit long. It is going to be a bit teacher-y because I want to share what I have been doing with interpretive tasks, and the new rubric that I developed. However, before that, if you cannot stand the teacher talk, I am going to talk a bit about how I relate my life and the lives of my students to my teaching.

This past weekend, I went to Lake Winnipesaukee with some of my greatest friends from college. I am currently working on providing input for my students in 8th grade on past tense, so I thought these two events would be perfect. So, I decided to make a Kahoot.

Here's how I have made Kahoot communicative:

It's rare for me to use Kahoot because it's hard for me to use it without it simply being grammar practice. However, every once in a while, I come up with something like what I did today. For those of you who don't know what Kahoot is, I pose a question/statement on the projector, and the students have to click on the right answer on their devices.

So, I created a Kahoot about my trip to Lake Winnipesaukee with my friends. The students would see four statements such as: "Alyssa swam in the lake. Alyssa went kayaking. Alyssa made breakfast. Alyssa slept in a tent." The students have to click on the statement that is true. The reason I consider this to be communicative is because they are all grammatically correct sentences, but the students have to make a logical guess and focus on the meaning. It really is just a matter of guessing which statement makes the most sense the first time around, and the second time around, it's more of a matter of remembering what they learned about my friends and me from the previous round. It's not always my favorite site to use, but the students love it.

Fortnite:

If you are not living under a rock, I am sure you have heard mention of this videogame Fortnite. It is taking over my students' lives, and, to be honest, I am so sick of hearing about it. Howeverrrrrrr, I was listening to The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, and someone was talking about the importance of relating what we teach to our students' lives. I know we hear this a lot, but it is always nice for me to be reminded of just how important this is. The first thing that popped into my head was Fortnite when I was listening to the podcast. I thought, "okay. I need to see if I can find a way to incorporate this into my teaching." I got home, and I did a quick Google search in Spanish.

I learned wayyyyy more about Fortnite than I wanted, but it ended up being one of my favorite decisions this year to incorporate it. I learned about these "skins" or "trajes" as they called them in Spanish. Basically; these are costumes (my students would kill me for calling them that) that you can earn/purchase in the game. I am currently in the clothing unit with my students, so I thought this was perfect! I decided to create an interpretive reading for my seventh graders using this publication about the top ten best skins of Fortnite (according to the author's opinion).

Let me tell you, this is one of my favorite assessments that I have ever given. The Spanish in this reading is NOT easy because it is very colloquial, but the students were SO engaged that they did not even notice. Students who are a bit more difficult to keep engaged in class were asking for permission to continue their answers on the back because they ran out of room. I am smiling just thinking about it!

The criticism I have gotten/given myself about this reading and Kahoot game is that I may not be able to use it again next year. This is so valid, and so true. However, if I want to keep my teaching relevant, I need to be adjusting my practice/assessment methods every year anyway. Isn't that what keeps teaching interesting? I really do not want to become one of those teachers who is so burnt out from teaching the same thing the same way year after year.

Interpretive Assessments:

The development of this interpretive reading on Fortnite also made me sharpen up my interpretive rubric. In my last post, I shared a rubric that I developed, and I said it was a work in progress. It was a work in progress, indeed, and it has changed SOOOO much and so many times since then. I have been meeting with the AMAZING reading specialist at my school over and over again to learn about the different skills and ways one can demonstrate comprehension of a text.

Here is the link to the rubric that I developed.

If you have taken the time to look at this rubric, you will see that there is a lot in there. This has required me to totally reevaluate the way that I give interpretive tasks. Today, I am going to focus on how I've done it with reading.

I give them two parts to the test.  The first test has the reading without the titles/headlines and pictures. The reading specialist told me that this would give me a better understanding of what the higher level students can do. On this assessment without all the visual support, the students are asked to:

·       Create a new title

·       Identify the main idea and support it with information from the text

·       Summarize what they have read

·       Identify the author’s purpose for writing the text (not quite the author’s perspective) 

Then, I give the students the second part of the text. It’s the same text, but now they have the title and the pictures if there are any. On this test, the students are asked to:

·       Identify the main idea if they now believe it’s different from what they wrote on the first part of the assessment.

·       Identify supporting details 

·       Guess meaning from context (I don’t calculate this in with the rubric, but I think it’s an awesome skill that I want them to develop)

·       Make inferences and cultural perspectives

It’s not always easy to associate a grade with this rubric, but I have found a way to do it.

My biggest question is with the supporting details. I know that a good rubric should not refer to quantity, and for the most part, I don’t really look at quantity as much as I do their ability to identify the supporting details and support with information from the text.

However, my question for other world language teachers is: are there different types of supporting details questions that show higher skills? Like, open ended questions versus true and false questions? I’m wondering if I could adjust the rubric with reference to that? I’m just not knowledgeable enough about that to add it to the rubric at this point.

Conclusion:

Although this rubric is not perfect, it is so much better than what I was using before. I am proud of the feedback that it has helped me provide for the students, and I finally feel that I can see the students at all different levels in proficiency on the same assessment. This newer way of assessing reading attached to a topic that the students love has been so inspiring. Try it and let me know how it goes!

Muchas gracias por leer,

Timothy