ON-DEMAND WEBINAR
Summative Assessment in Playground
Video transcript
Natasha: Hello and welcome to today’s Summative Assessment in Playground webinar. My name is Tash, and I work at Xplor as part of the training team, and I will be leading today’s webinar. Before we get started, I would love to share an acknowledgement of country with you. I would like to show my respect and acknowledge the Koontamooka people as the traditional custodians of the lands, winds and waters from where I gathered today. I extend my acknowledgement to the traditional custodians throughout Australia celebrating their diversity, culture and ongoing connections to lands, winds and waters throughout Australia, including where you gather from today. I pay respect to Elders, past, present and emerging, extending that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people joining us today.
Excellent. As always in our webinars, we’d love to interact and engage with you. We want to make sure that the content we’re delivering and sharing with you is relevant. So, if you do have any questions, or there are things that you would like to see in a bit more detail, please let us know. You can do that by using the Q&A button.
This will be found in your Teams toolbar across the top. So, if you just press on Q&A, you can pose your questions, and I have allotted some time at the end of today’s session to go through and be answering anything that has been posed in there. You can also engage and collaborate with each other through the comment section as well. So, if you’d like to put some comments into the chat, you can be engaging with one another in there. You can be sharing ideas on how you might be doing things, or if you’ve got an idea on how you would like to do something and just see if other people are also doing that, please feel more than welcome to jump into the chat also.
Excellent. As I mentioned, today’s. Our webinar is around summative assessments in Playground. So, a summative assessment in the early learning realm is something that the educators might complete for children at the end of the year. And this would be really a recap of their progress, in terms of where they’re at in their learning and development journey. Summative assessments are amazing to be sharing for children who are going to school. So, you can give a little insight into their teachers around things that they have achieved, things that they’re working on, the contribution that their family has had, maybe some goals that you’re still working on. And it just sets that child and that educator up for success in the new year.
When we’re talking about summative assessments internally at your service, you may be conducting these for children as they’re progressing up into different rooms at your service. So, a really great insight from one educator in one room to deliver into that child’s new room. Just means that there’s consistency and continuity in their care, that their goals are continuously being worked on and you’re not having to redevelop anything. And that way that child isn’t stagnant in their learning journey, but they’re constantly progressing.
So summative assessments can be used in a variety of different ways. It’s really at your interpretation and we at Xplor just want to show you how you might highlight these in your Playground system. So during today’s session we will go through our documenting children’s learning and development so we’re just going to have a brief chat around the few areas that you can use in Playground and how you might use them but really it’s at your interpretation on what you’d like to do in your Playground system. Then we’re going to talk about how to collaborate with families. So, when we’re talking about summative assessments you’re going to add a little recap around, the family’s goals and their hopes for their child. So how are you going to collaborate with families to get this insight information? And you can do that through Playground, and we’ll talk about that. We’ll also go through the summative assessment layouts and the customization options that you have. So where could you house these? What could they look like? It’s really up to you, but let’s brainstorm and give you a couple of ideas and suggestions. And then, as I mentioned, we’ll end everything off with a little Q&A time. So, if you do have questions, please pose them. I’m so happy to go through and answer those live.
Excellent. Let’s jump into the Playground system and get started.
Okay, so logging into Playground, I am going to be working out of Playground Web. This is predominantly where you will be completing all of your programming, learning, development, all of your documentation. It’s easy to do through Playground Web. If you are utilizing an iPad, you will be able to go through the programming and planning tab that you have on the iPad if you are using IOS. And you’ll get the same features on there.
When we’re talking about children’s learning and development and documenting this throughout the year or throughout their time in a select room, you’ve got a couple of options, but one that we have placed in the system and one that we highly recommend it’s mirrored off the ACEQA guides is placing the milestone tracker into your Playground system. For us, we’ve done that through tables, and we’ve set it as a layout design. So, when we come into our tables down to layouts, we’ve got all of our developmental milestones in here. This is just one way. So again, you can interpret this how you’d like. But for us, opening up the three to five, we have mirrored this directly from ACECQA. And it breaks down the developmental milestones for a child based on their age. So, you can put all your age ranges in that would associate to the children that you care for. In here, I’ve got their physical development. As you scroll down, you’ve got their social, emotional, cognitive development. And again, this all relates back to those milestones that this child would be achieving. The way that we have positioned this in our Playground system is that you would come through, you would pop the start date in here. So, if I was starting this off today being the 24th of October 2024, I could tag the child in here. I can place their date of birth if I know it or if that’s not relevant information or something that you want to be adding in there, you don’t have to add it in. And then you can put your observers and your collaborators and your contributors in here. So which educators are going to be adding into here. If you just write at, and then you can be tagging your educators. There is no limit in here. You can be adding as many collaborators as you’d like. So, this might be if you have focus groups in your centre. Certain children might fall under a certain educator for a focus group. You might contribute all of the educators for a particular classroom, so everyone’s collaborating and contributing to this child’s learning journey. So, you might tag everyone. Completely up to you.
Once that information is in there, the way that this would work is as you’re doing your learning stories, your developmental stories, your what we did today’s, all of that documentation that you’re doing in Playground, you might click, drag, and drop it in here as a reference piece to show that this child has met that developmental milestone. And here’s the evidence. So, for example, if I wrote a learning observation on Darla around dress ups. So, she loves putting on dress up. She likes taking off dress up. She likes the costume element, the role play element that could actually meet quite a lot of the milestones. So going through and just working out which ones of those have been met based on, on those achievements. And then you could go through, and you could actually put that piece of documentation, that learning document, if it’s an observation or whatever it is that you’ve written it up as in here as a reference piece. So again, if it meets quite a few of these areas, then you could be click track and dropping it into each of those.
Across the top here, you’ll see that I’ve put yes, that they have achieved it, no, and then you’ve got emerging. So this is where you might come in and actually be typing notes to say that we have facilitated an activity and we’re working with Dala to really grow her development in being able to hop, jump, run, maybe she’s a little uncoordinated, maybe we’re just working on that balance. So that emerging column is something that you could be writing these notes in, and it just shows a holistic journey of learning for this child. So, this is an idea of what you might be doing throughout the year. The reason that I’m referencing this in our summative assessment webinar is you could pull up this document at the end of the year and this is going to intuitively inform your summative assessment. So, you’ve got all of your evidence. You’ve got all of your case notes in here. You might be putting, your family goals in here. Your professional goals in here for that child. So, you can come into here and be referencing all of this and that will inform that summative assessment and it’s going to make it a lot easier to be writing that.
So this is an idea again that we got directly from ACECQA with the milestone checklist that they house on there, but what this looks like for your service is really at your interpretation, but we just want to get you thinking about how you’re documenting children’s learning and how you’re keeping track of it.
So this is an option. You can always just save these as drafts, so if you don’t want your families privy to reading these, either don’t tag the child or just save it as a draft and it stays as an internal document. If you do publish to parents, then your families will be able to read this, they’ll be able to comment, which is a really great way to have them collaborating and contributing to their child’s learning journey. So again, completely up to you. If you would like that publicized and the family be collaborating with you, or if you’d like to keep this more as an internal reference piece again, that is going to inform your summative assessment at the end of the year. For this example, I’m going to publish mine.
Once it is published or saved, you can keep coming back in and editing these. So, you either just press on it and press on edit and then keep adding and contributing. And then the family, if you have published that, will get that update as well. So, they’re kept up to date as to what it is that you’ve added, where their child’s at with their milestones, what they could be collaborating further with.
So talking about how you’re gathering your evidence throughout the year that’s going to inform your summative assessments. That’s a great way, especially in the early years sector, where you’ve got a little bit of staff turnover. Things change throughout the year. You want to make sure that you have a holistic overview of what that child has achieved and by having that in your system. Everyone’s able to go in and view.
When we’re talking about the summative assessment, however, you could create this in three different levels. You’ve got your documents, you’ve got your canvas, and you’ve got your tables. It’s really a personal preference around which one of these you might use depending on which documenting level you feel most comfortable with. If you’re talking about documents, canvas, and tables, you can print these, so you’ll be able to provide the printed document. to whomever might need it. So, if we’re talking about children who are graduating and moving on to school, you can print and then and provide that through to their teacher or give a copy to the family to provide to the teacher. When we’re talking about children moving up internally to different rooms, because all of your educators have access to Playground, they can jump on into the child’s profile and actually read the summative assessment for themselves. They don’t necessarily have to print it. So, it’s a great way to inform everyone on where this child’s at in their learning and development.
If we start with documents, I have created a skeleton in the system to get you thinking about what yours could look like. But you can put your logo up the top so you can be customizing this document with your service information. It’s a great way to obviously stamp what early learning service they came from, if they are going to a school. This is for a child that’s moving to a school. It also gives that more professional look, especially if you’re printing this for families, so they’ve got a hard copy of it. You can have your central logo on there. So, I’ve added that in there.
In your summative assessment, you want to include things like your child’s name, their date of birth, who’s contributed and collaborated in this piece of work, so this might come directly from the educators that work in the room you might also have an area or an element where families have also collaborated in here, so you might also be referencing that, mum’s added some goals, dad added some goals, Poppy’s added some things in there as well.
And then the date of completion. So, we want to know when this is valid from. Children’s development is very rapid at, especially 0 to 5. A lot of things change quite quickly. So, when was this summative assessment written, just so we know how relevant the information is to that child currently.
You might opt to have your, your educators place a child photo in here, so they would do that the same way they could for any other documenting piece, just coming into content in here, click, drag and drop an image, you would find the child’s photo in here, and then they can upload it. So, if this was my child’s photo here, then I could just remove that little blurb, and then I’ve got the photo in there.
And then you will put your key points of reference. So, what is this summative assessment answering to? For this example, I have based it on the learning outcomes for the EYLF. So, I’ve put the five learning outcomes in there and I would just expect my educator to come through and give examples of how this child has met this goal, is working towards this goal, or what we have in place currently to assist them to be achieving this learning outcome. You want to be putting real life examples in here of how they’ve met them. So, if we’re talking to learning outcome one around the child has a strong sense of identity, then we want to give examples of how this is evident with this child. So, this child is showcasing that they have a strong sense of identity on this state they did this and then on this state, they achieved this. And then it’s been evident over the last month that this child has shown confidence when doing this. The level of detail that your educators are putting into this summative assessment is key. The benefit of being in documents is there is no word count limit, so they can go through and be adding as much detail as they would like. They could also be referencing other documents in here, so if you have had observations, you can actually reference them in here. If you are printing this, obviously, referencing another document in here is not going to be accessible in a printed version. So really the level of detail that they are hand typing in here is going to be key.
But we’ve put the learning outcomes 1 to 5. I’ve also added some areas at the bottom around child’s current interest. So, what are they currently interested in? What do they like? This is really going to inform the next educators, whether that’s the teacher, whether they’re moving up to a new room around the child’s current interest, which will be great for the program, but it could also be reference to what soothes them, what comforts them. So, if they’re feeling a little upset, if they’re feeling a little anxious about moving to a new learning environment, you might be putting things in there, referencing that they have, a snuggie or a comforter or, they, they get a little bit intimidated around loud voices. So, you might want to provide a quiet area for this child to be in. They have a favourite book. So maybe you might want to have that on hand to help soothe them through the transition or change period.
Planning to support further learning and development. So, this would be referencing things around current goals that haven’t been closed off or achieved yet. So, putting that in there is really key around what are we still working on in terms of this child’s development. If they aren’t great with their fine motor, if they’re really struggling with their writing skills, if, their auditory it is what we’re working on. Then we want to reference those in here. The whole goal of a summative assessment is to set the child and the new educator up for success. So, giving a detailed overview of what that child’s needs are, and some tips and tricks, and some things that you have currently been working on is really key, but doing that in a professional manner.
And then I’ve also added a section in here around family. So, what’s the family’s contribution? What are their goals? Have they left any comments? We want to have that family aspect in there. We want that element to be key because collaborating with families is a huge goal and it’s definitely a huge part of the development of a child is making sure that consistently we’re collaborating with the family and we’re showing that consistency from home life to the educator realm.
So this is what it could look like if you were to create a summative assessment in documents.
Excellent. You can also create this in tables. So, coming into tables again, I’ve put a skeleton in the system. This is what it could look like. So again, you can add your branding in here. You can insert the child’s photo. I’ve got the same questions posed in here. A benefit of tables is that you’ve got these segmented areas that you could be writing the information in. Again, no word count in here, so this could be as large or as small as you need it to be. But you can also colour code everything in tables. So, you’ve got your colouring up the top here, and you can do your different shades. So, we’ve used a lot of the colours that we have in our logo. When you print, this is what they’re going to see as well. So, it could be quite a colourful space if you’ve got educators that like to work in a bit more of a creative format. Then tables are a really great space for them. Again, you can publish this so parents have a copy of this on their home app that they can reference. You can also have this printed to go to the school if the children are transitioning to school. Otherwise, educators will be able to see this in the Playground platform under the child’s profile. So, for their new children, they might go through and just be reviewing the summative assessments for the previous room.
So a really great way, again, to capture that information in your system, you can be saving summative assessments as a layout, so then all your educators can go through and just select on the layout and answer the questions as per how you have constructed and posed
The last area that they may want to be creating their summative assessments in is Canvas. So, this is an example of what I’ve created. Again, still posing the same question. So, we’ve got our branding in the middle here. We’ve got our outcome areas around here. I’ve opened up these boxes here. So, this is where they might be coming through and actually answering the questions or writing evidence in regards to the learning outcomes that I’ve placed there. You’ve got your family area over here you’ve got your planning and support. So that future development, what are you currently working on that? You haven’t quite achieved with that child. You can pop that over here and then you’ve got the child’s current interest. I’ve also placed an area for the child details, so you can put their photo in here. You can be adding those collaborators, the child’s date of birth, all of the child’s information can go over here. So, canvas is a little bit more of a creative space for those educators that, that really like that creative element. They like to work in colour. They like to work in shapes. They can come in here and you could create something similar to this for them to be posing that information in. The only thing about canvas is obviously if you do publicize it, it can only be seen by families on the web. So, they’ll have to go to home.myxplor.com. It isn’t able to be seen on their Home app but you can print canvas. So going through, you’ll be able to print this and print it off for anyone similar to how you would for documents and tables as well.
So a really great area for educators to come through and be quite creative but add all of the relevant information. It’s really at your discretion when we’re talking about summative assessments, where you’d like to position those, whether it’s a document, a canvas or a table. The key would be obviously having access to the full learning data for that child, for the room that they’re currently in so that would come down to your observations, your daily learning reports that you’re sending out however else you’re capturing that information. You might be using posts for snapshots and all of that as well. So where are you housing that? How can that be seen? And how can that inform your summative assessment for this child?
If you opt not to use the milestone tracker that I mentioned, you can come into your child profile, and you will be able to see all of their learning in here. You can segment their learning by type, so if you predominantly shared learning through posts, then you can just segment your view to post.
Otherwise, you can see via all types. If you’d like to see Moments, which is your family input, you can segment your view and go back through retrospectively and look at the Moments that the family shared, they may have shared some really key milestones and achievements that the child has had at home, but they may have also been sharing things that they would like you to work on. So it might be that we’re working on, fine motor, so this is where we’re at home, and then that may have intuitively become a goal at the centre. So, you can see all of those Moments reflectively, go back through, make sure that you’ve achieved them, see what’s still outstanding to be achieved, and then add that into the summative assessment. So that’s all in here.
So hopefully that’s answered some questions around the summative assessment, how you might use it, and how you might position it in Playground. We’ve got some time left now for questions, so if anyone does have any questions, please pop them into the Q& A. I’m so happy to answer those live.
All right, we don’t have any questions that’s come through. I will take that as a positive that hopefully I’ve answered everything in terms of summative assessments. If anything does pop up in the future, we have incredible resources on our knowledge base. This recording will be accessible to you as well, so you can always come back through and review this. If you’re looking at the layout designs that we have in our test service, which I’ve demoed from today, these are all accessible through Pinterest. So, if you would like to go on and check out any of our layout designs, please feel more than welcome. If you would like any of the layout designs directly in your system, so if you see something on Pinterest that you absolutely love, you can request that through the support team. You can do that through email. You can also phone the support team, and they will be able to give you the email details over the phone. When you come into Pinterest, it’s Xplor Playground. We’ve segmented everything under folders, so you’ll be able to go through each folder and view, layout designs that we have in the comments. It lets you know where this sits. So, if it’s a document, a table or a canvas. If you’d like to see how this prints, we’ve also added in the Dropbox link. And we’ve downloaded all of these into PDF format, so you’ll be able to see it in a PDF perspective. So please feel more than welcome to also go check out those resources. Again, if you would like any of those, we are so happy to share them. You can just make a request through the support team, and we’ll be able to share into your provider.
Excellent. We still don’t have any questions, so I will wrap up and give you 15 minutes back in your day. Thank you so much for attending today’s webinar and I look forward to seeing you at a future one.
Thanks so much. Bye.
Video Details
Tips and tricks on using Playground for summative assessments
Join Tash from our training team as she takes you through the creation of Playground layouts, collaborative opportunities on a summative assessment document and answers any questions attendees might have on using Playground for summative assessments.
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