Testing in Distance Education

Distance education is an education as a teacher daily. I am constantly learning new things. One of the things was shocked about this year was that we have to administer the MAP reading and math assessments for the fall, winter and spring. This tests the students growth over the year.

We started doing these tests in middle school last year. Last year, I was not in a classroom so I did not pay attention that closely AND I could not follow along with the training as I did not have a class to log into. So it was hit and miss what I gleaned from the training. Totally my fault. To a point.

Fast forward to this week. We were given a memo, ONLY a memo last week or maybe it was the week before school opened that we had to have our kids tested by the end of this week. The second week of school.

We barely know their names and have solved tech issues and are now logging them in to testing situations. GREAT!

Finally, our admin, who is wonderful, held a meeting. They pushed back the date but I was already set to push forward. I had prepped my kids and had to start. No looking back. Thank the heavens my admin was there in a google meet all day to answer questions because I was there every class asking dumb ass questions.

First period wasn’t too bad. I thought,” This isn’t so bad. This is going to work.” Then a screen went black.

But…there was a fix for that. I followed the procedure and fixed that. No problem.

Second period. Now. Second period was the test of patience. I think out of six kids maybe two logged in successfully and finished the test. The other four could either: not download the app, not log in, kept getting kicked out, our just didn’t want to take the test. It was any of these options.

I gave up after three days with this group. I couldn’t we spent forty minutes trying to log these kids in. Suspending them. Test again. Confirm. Suspend. Test again. I think some of the problem was on my end. It made me hit the button twice while in period one it didn’t make me do that.

Period three was fine. They all tested except one kid who said the app wouldn’t download and logged out of the classroom and never came back to the meet. Nothing I can do there.

All and all…remote testing is ridiculous. This is not a good thing to put kids through or teachers through. I spent most of the day yelling, “Are you on the log in screen? No you spelled it wrong. It has a capital T and a space. Reading does not end with a Y. Are you on the login screen? Come back to the meet if you can’t get in. What? Yes, i’ll confirm you.”

What a weird couple of days. Now on to some real teaching today. Plot. What do we know about plot. I know shit about plot as I think I’ve given up on my fantasy story for the time being. I don’t think i’m cut out for a fantasy writer when I’m not manic.