Free Download: Learner Profile Survey

Learner Profile Survey Free Download

 

At Anastasis Academy, our year begins by building a Learner Profile for every student. Before we’ve even ventured into the school year, we know a tremendous amount about our students. This is the first step for building student agency. Our Learner Profile is made up of six parts:

  1. The Learner Profile Survey (student’s interests/passions)
  2. Multiple Intelligence Strengths
  3. Learning Style Preferences
  4. Brain Dominance
  5. Parent/guardian hopes and goals for the school year (both social/emotional and academic)
  6. Strengths finder results (we like Thrively!)

We get a lot of requests for our Learner Profile template. Today, I’m sharing the first piece: the Learner Profile Survey. These are the questions we ask our students each year to get a better understanding of who they are, what makes them tick, what their vulnerabilities are.

To download this resource for FREE, just enter your information below and you’ll receive an email with the Learner Profile Survey PDF!

The complete Learner Profile template is free with purchase of the Learning Genome Project Card Sets that help you determine multiple intelligence strengths, learning style preferences, and brain dominance.

FREE Learner Profile Survey Download

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To learn more about the how and why of Learner Profiles, check out the related posts below:
And, if you just can’t get enough Learner Profile goodness and want to see these live and in action, be sure to join us in February for the 5Sgima Edu Conference!

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CompassLearning Learning Profiler: Getting to know your students

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What it is: At Anastasis Academy, we individualize curriculum for every student.  We don’t purchase any boxed, one-size-fits-all curriculum.  Instead, we create a learner profile for each student.  I pulled together a variety of learning style inventories, multiple intelligence strength finders, and brain dominance predictors and mashed them up into a child-friendly teacher/student survey.  Our teachers spend two days before the first day of school going through these inventories with students.  I compile the information (along with their interests and passions) and put it all in an at-a-glance document.  I’m just revamping the document a little bit to look more like a big baseball card with learning stats.  We use these learner profiles all year long as a starting point for pulling curriculum, lessons and resources that will best meet the individual child’s needs.  (Learning Genome 1.0)

Educators often ask if we can share this process, unfortunately right now it isn’t pretty or sharable in any meaningful way.  When the Learning Genome is completed and launched, we will be able to share this process with the world.

Today, I ran across a tool that can help bridge the gap for teachers who are seeking a way to better customize the classroom experience for their students.  CompassLearning has created a Learning Profiler that is free to use and the results are easy to share.  While it doesn’t include all of the components of an Anastasis learner profile, it is a great starting point!  Students (who are independent readers) can go through the online survey and learn more about their learning style, interest areas and expression style.  This information would be SO helpful as a starting place for getting to know the students in your classroom better.  It would go a long way in helping you pull resources and tools that will best meet the needs of the individual. When a student is finished going through the profiler, they can share their result “badges” with others through a link to the badges, through Facebook, Twitter, email or a printed report.

How to integrate CompassLearning Learning Profiler into the classroom: At the beginning of a new school year (or semester), students who are independent readers could complete the Learning Profiler on classroom computers in a center rotation, or in a computer lab setting.  Results could be printed out or shared with the teacher via email.  I’ve found it helpful to compile these results so that I can see overlapping interests and learning needs in the classroom.  It would also be interesting to create a bulletin board with the different “badges” represented and with a picture of each student.  Students can connect their pictures to the badges using string and push-pins or staples.  It would be neat to have a web of information about your students visual for all students to see.  This would be a good getting-to-know-you activity where students could visually see their similarities displayed. 

For non-independent readers, the process would be a little more arduous.  During a silent reading or independent work time, pull students one at a time to sit and interview them.  I actually prefer the arduous method because you get all of the in-between commentary from the students which gives you a more complete picture of who they are, what they love, fear, get excited about, etc.  Even with our independent readers at Anastasis, we create our learner profiles through teacher interview.  There is something more personal and human about it.  Using this method may take a few weeks to get through all of your students, the information you glean will be invaluable!  If you teach younger students but have an older grade of “buddies,” it may be helpful to have the buddy help conduct the surveys and record the answers of the younger child.  Again, this would be a great way for the students to really get to know each other.

After you have received the results, use the information to help you plan learning activities.  If you have a student struggling in an area of learning, use the strengths and interests you know they have to come at the learning from a different angle.  Education blogs, your PLN, and Pinterest are great places to find the perfect learning opportunity to help the students in your class.  I promise you that when you connect with students this way, you will be showing them that they matter, that you care about them as an individual and that you want what is best for them.  They won’t feel like a number!  If you are looking for a specific technology resource, iLearn Technology is a great place to start the search.  Over there —> in my right side bar you will find a multi category search.  Narrow down the search by Bloom’s Taxonomy, resource type, subject area, etc.  Click search and away you go!  You can also search by keyword in the search box toward the top of the screen.  I try to tag the bejeebers out of all of my posts so that no matter how specific the search, you will find what you are looking for.  Full disclosure, I use that search box ALL the time when I am pulling resources for students at Anastasis.

Tips: Want to see what the future of personalized learning will look like?  Check out the Learning Genome Project.

I’ve been nominated for a Bammy Award for Educational Blogger.  I’d appreciate your vote to help spread the word about iLearn Technology.  Vote here.  Thank you for your continued support!!

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using  CompassLearning Learning Profiler in your classroom.

“Facebook” profile pages for literary characters

Today I worked with a mixed seventh and eighth grade class who is reading To Kill a Mockingbird.  The teacher was looking for ways for the students to explore the characters more in-depth and think about how authors develop characters.  I thought having the students create a fake “Facebook” profile page would be a great way to accomplish all of those learning goals. As one of the students said, “It is totally fun!”.    The challenge with this particular classroom is that we are working within a mixed platform environment.  There are PC’s and Macs of all different operating systems and ages.  The one common we have going for us is an Internet connection.

Each student created an information page about one of the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird that looked just like a Facebook information page.  This gave them the opportunity to think  about characteristics, interests, activities, quotes, and some creative license to flesh out the details.  I knew about My Fake Wall, but because of the HEAVY advertising, and request for an email address I wasn’t convinced it was the best place for students to create a character profile.  For the record I like the site a lot and the results are impressive but all of the advertisements are obnoxious and I wasn’t convinced it wouldn’t get hung up by a filter.  I needed a plan B.  I ended up creating a Facebook information page template using Pages.  The problem: not all of the students had Pages to use the template (that mixed environment thing).  So, I got creative and settled on exporting the Pages document as a PDF and uploading it to Crocodoc for students.  I uploaded it once for each student (so each would have a unique URL to edit).  It worked great! Students used Crocodoc to annotate over the template and then could download the finished pdf it to their computers.  Some students chose to find an online picture that they could use for the profile picture, other students created their own avatar type pictures of the character using the drawing tools in Crocodoc (they turned out great…such little artists).

When the students were finished, they headed over to see if they could get My Fake Wall to work.  Miracle of miracles it wasn’t blocked (I was surprised!).  My Fake Wall has the students create the profile page of a character where they can create posts and discussions between characters.  They used the information page they created as a starting place and created a conversation between several characters.  It was a big hit except they were disappointed that it didn’t actually work like Facebook. They were wanting to each create their character and actually interact as the character.  If they were older I would have considered letting them use Facebook this way.

The students really enjoyed thinking about characters this way and as we were wrapping up for the day they asked, “could we go on here and create some of these for historical characters?”  One wanted to take on Hitler and another Columbus.  I always consider a lesson successful when students aren’t ready to stop the learning…this one was a success!

If you are interested in using the template I created, you can do so by first downloading the original from Facebook Template.  Next, upload the pdf template to your own Crocodoc page.  You will need to do this for each student or they will all be collaboratively working on the same document.  Give students their unique URL, and they are off.  If you don’t have access to computers but would still like to use my template, feel free to print it out and have students work on it the old school way.