We made it. This date has been circled, highlighted, and underlined on every one's calendar for a long time. That's right, it's finals week. It's a week when students are asked to completely forget the schedule we have made them memorize (our class schedule this week is totally different) and then ask them to perform on a final assessment of some sort. Maybe they have to take a test with essays to write and terms to match. Maybe they have to give a presentation on how the circular system keeps our bodies alive...In my class I treat finals a little different.
Being a technology teacher has it's quirks and finals week is certainly one of them...I have my students complete a final project in my class, not a test. The project does a few things that I like...one is, it takes a discipline like web design, which at times is very complex and abstract, and gives me a simpler more effective way to measure knowledge, growth, and success in my class. More important than that is it allows my students the opportunity to be creative and excel in a way that a standard multiple choice exam does not.
In today's educational environment everything is about data...how do we know students grew? How do we know teachers are teaching? What matrices are we using to measure these outputs? This is perhaps the paramount reason that I LOVE project based finals. I can demonstrate to another teacher/student/Principal/parent that my students have grown, because lets face it, if a student didn't know Dreamweaver when they started my class, and now they are creating comprehensive websites in it, THEN I KNOW THEY HAVE LEARNED!
Finals week will be an interesting time for this first year teacher. I look forward to learning what it is all about, and continuing to improve to make next semester that much better.
Until then, I hope you all are having a happy holiday season!
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