Franco Posa has been using Floop since Fall 2017. He currently works as a physics and engineering teacher at St. John’s School in Houston, TX. He has held previous positions as physics teacher and network engineer in Maryland Public Schools. He has been married for 35 years to Mary Posa and has two children and three grandchildren.
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About 6 years ago, my physics curriculum was moving towards being more project-based and with this, I was looking for a dramatically different way to give my students feedback. It was an issue! Teachers tend to give feedback retrospectively instead of during the learning process. Giving feedback at the end of an assignment is too late to do remediation. I needed a way to evaluate student work and give feedback throughout the process of students working on their projects.
I met Melanie at a training hosted by Engineer Your World. I attended a session on Floop and decided to try it. It was exactly what I was looking for! Floop gives touch-points along the way for project-based learning and this was very useful. I had a few colleagues who decided to try it after they saw my success and now we have most of the physics group and 1-2 chemistry teachers using Floop. Some ed-tech tools that get pushed into classrooms are so convoluted and require time to make useful. Floop is so easy to use that I have found I can pull people aside who are carrying home 2 boxes of papers, say, “Let’s try something different,” and give them a quick demo and they feel ready to use it right away.
In both my physics and engineering courses, I really push notebooks. With Floop, I am able to do quick checks along the way, this gives both myself and my students a piece of information about where they are at that time. For example, one of the first things I have students do is note-taking on documentation of safety; my students submit for no credit, but they have to do it. I can quickly leave feedback for every student, have a record of the assignment, and make comments back and forth with the students. The students are required to go through comments to see the grade, rather than just look at their grades. That’s what works in my classroom! Kids use Floop as a verb — “I gotta Floop this, gotta Floop that”. Every student is submitting a unique assignment, so being able to give individualized feedback with speed just makes more sense.