A Plethora of Assessments

 I am not sure if I have mentioned this is the past, but I am a part of the transition committee for my high school district. We have met monthly for the last 3 months for: 1. We are planning and organizing a Transition Fair. 2. We are working towards getting uniform as far as transition goes for the 19 high schools in our district which includes putting together a matrix of what we will teach and also suggested informal assessments we can use. 3. We have been working towards putting together a portfolio that will follow the students through their 4 years of high school. 

 The portfolio will contain information about the students abilities, interests, training's they have done, assessments, things they know, places they've been, and resources among other things. 

Now, I teach kids who have already finished their 4 years of high school, so we will start new portfolios when they come to us. We figured 8 years of information might be a bit much for one binder. The good news is, I will the opportunity to look at their high school portfolios before they get sent home for them to keep. So much more information that just having an IEP to look over for sure.

Like I said above, we have been combing the internet for informal assessments for the past few months. The transition committee will be supplying 16 suggested assessments. There will be 2 vocational assessments and 2 aptitude assessments for each of the 4 years. 

Since my program starts after they leave high school I thought, why not put all the assessments together on the "U" drive (a drive that is accessible to all teachers in our program) and our 19 teachers can pick which ones work best for them? I also put hard copies of each assessment in a binder by the copy machine for quick access. I have given each assessment a rating (with help from my colleagues). Emerging, Intermediate, and advanced to again make it easier for teachers to know which ones might work best for their level of students. If it's an assessment that can be taken online, I just named the assessment  ex. "Voc Online eLEARN" than put the link on a page for them to click on. Since we are not allowed to use the same assessments year after year I think it's going to be great to be able to go to one place and have a variety of good assessments to choose from.

What we did find was, there was not a lot of informal assessments for our emerging kids. I would find an assessment that I thought might work only to be told by the emerging teachers that their kids wouldn't be able to do it. So what does one do? We make up their own! I did this one shown with the help from the emerging teachers. There are 33 activities in the set. It can either be done by giving them both the "thumbs up" and the "thumbs down" cards and letting them choose which one, or as we did with a student the other day, gave him a choice of a few thumbs up activities and asked him which one he like and he chose. We were able to come up with a couple more "teacher fill in" assessments as well. 

I will be putting this in my store sometime in the near future. A couple of the photos I don't own so I will have to wait for my daughter in law to draw them for me so I can switch them out. It will be there before the new school year if you're interested. I can't believe there are only 14 more days left in my school year!! Where did the time go!?!?

Take Care,