PEDAGOGY – Jonathan Keck

A Reflection on Assessment: My Journey through CEP813

At the heart of assessment is identifying what students know and don’t know and shaping classroom experiences to deepen student learning. I began CEP813 “Electronic Assessment for Teaching and Learning” with this fundamental view. Over the last several months, my understanding of assessments has deepened in exciting and frustrating ways. I began seeing assessments as […]

A Critical Evaluation of History Gamification

Dungeons and Dragons-style gameplay is a natural form that lends itself to the Twine platform. Immersive storytelling is compelling, especially when one gets to make their own choices on how the story unfolds. This is especially true of young learners tackling abstract concepts from hundreds of years ago as the discipline of history demands. I […]

Creating History Gameplay with Twine: An Iterative Approach

Learning through play is powerful. If our task is to move history and social science out of the “boring” category, designing and creating meaningful and fun games is paramount. A week ago I set out to start designing my first digital game using Twine and exploring the Black Death in European History. While I wrote […]

Gamifying the History Classroom: A Black Death Choice Simulation

History class does not need to be boring, despite the stereotype in pop-culture. Indeed, who can forget the infamous scene from Farris Bueller’s Day Off and the cringe-worthy monotone economics lecture from Ben Stein? History does not need to be like this. One can still have depths of information, insight, and skill-development while having fun […]

ASSESSMENT CREATION AND CANVAS

Designing creative assessments and facilitating critical thinking through choice in the mode and expression of learning is fundamental to my approach in this assessment. I have been developing an assessment checklist to assist in designing learning experiences and assessments that align with these values. This assignment was designed for AP World History and World History […]

ASSESSING CANVAS ASSESSMENT TOOLS

Canvas is perhaps one of the most popular and quickly rising stars among the online learning platforms being used by colleges and K-12 schools. The company prides itself on being composed of former teachers who know education and know first hand what teaching and running a classroom is like. They claim that this is what […]

Assessment Design Checklist 3.0

When designing a learning experience, there are hundreds of concerns that run through the teacher’s mind. Confusion might be one word to describe it, but it often feels like multivariable calculus. Indeed, the lesson planning and assessment design process are best captured in the following gifs. Fortunately, a class I am currently taking in the […]

Formative Assessment Design 2.0: Building Students Toward a Better DBQ by Focusing on Image Analysis

Context and Purpose As I’ve written before, Document Based Question (DBQ) is critical for the Social Science student and provides the ultimate application of historical thinking and reasoning. It requires that students read various sources and understand them such that they can cobble together enough information from multiple sources to respond to a question. Ultimately, […]

Assessment Design Checklist 2.0

If you’re like me, my mind gets swamped amid all the things I want and need to recall and apply in my classroom each day. Assessments (aka, everything done in the classroom on a daily bases) can be overwhelming. I am writing an assessment checklist to go over each time I plan learning activities for […]

Effectively Teaching Critical Thinking through Document Analysis: Formative Assessment, Backward Design, and the DBQ

The Document Based Question or DBQ is not often used in the average Social Science and History classroom. Advanced Placement (AP) classes use them as part of the learning and assessment process to prepare students for the AP Exam. Nevertheless, the average student and curriculum ought to use more DBQs however challenging they may be. […]