The Ready Category
Am I Ready? An effort score of “Ready” is given to students that arrive on time, have their supplies, and are quietly listening when you begin class. Absences and Tardies can also be tracked.
If you decide Ready scoring will include “bell work,” it’s better for the students to understand that they earn their Ready points – not that they are spotted 10 points and then lose points if they don’t meet expectations. With this in mind, go ahead and lower the scores of students that are not meeting expectations during the time allotted for bell work, but wait until the time is nearly up to quickly give all other students a score of “Ready” by using the “Score all Students” button.
The Participation Category
Am I Participating? Student names are listed randomly and you can view them either in “Card” or “List” view. Regular use of this category will equalize student participation opportunities, improve individual and class focus, and help students gain confidence.
SUGGESTION: to help students feel more at ease, use the “talk to your neighbor” technique before calling on several students. Spread the spotlight by saying “Yvonne, what did you and your neighbor come up with?”
With the Participation category, you are scoring attentiveness not whether or not students can answer questions correctly. For students who do not have an answer or a guess, request that they repeat the question to show they were paying attention – “I don’t know what else is needed for photosynthesis” – is a high score because the student is proving they were paying attention.
The Participation category may be used to select students to answer questions, repeat directions, give an opinion, read aloud, etc. Some students have anxiety about reading in front of their peers. Tell your students to let you know if they want to be skipped for Participation/reading.
From chapter ten of Teach Like a Champion – the goal when reading aloud in class is to have one student as the primary reader and the remaining students as secondary readers. The primary reader should be changed often and unpredictably. The transition from one primary reader to the next should be done with a minimum of words. “Thank you, next is Carl.”
The On Task Category
Am I On Task? The ability of students to focus and stay on task is an important skill to reinforce. When explaining a learning task, link student effort scoring to your expectations. “In deciding your effort score for today’s lab, I will be watching to see if you a) work well with your group, b) enter the correct data in your data table including units, c) stay at your lab station, and d) clean up the lab area.”
Go around the room and reinforce strong effort by complimenting individual students or student groups. When you encounter a student whose effort is below full credit, let them know that you will check back later and raise their on-task score if they improve their effort. (Use “more scoring options” to allow 9 scoring options instead of 3.)
In addition to scoring student effort, you can use the On Task category to reduce your workload by scoring student work with the App. For some types of assignments, this would allow you to skip the steps of collecting, marking, and returning papers.
You can use the menu item “Create New Subcategory” (see image arrow) to create a separate listing of scoring or scoring type (e.g. Group work). If you do this from the Teacher Dashboard instead of the mobile App you can assign the Subcategory to more than one Course at a time. This gives you the option of entering scores in your grade book later (the app is not connected to your grade book so scores will need to be entered manually).
The Behavior Category
Am I Behaving? Using the scoring app to score disruptive behavior in the moment, is not recommended. Instead, track student behavioral-redirects (mentally or on paper) and enter behavior scores after class or on an interval schedule that works for you. We suggest that you change the maximum point value to reflect the number of days you’re scoring (1 day = 10, … 5 days = 50). To change the maximum point value, tap the point-value box in the upper-right corner of the App.
From the Behavior category, teachers may quickly send comments to parents/guardians and students. Your comments are sent to the student’s portal and an email alert is sent to any parents or guardians associated with the student.