Week 8 Final Revised--for now

This week we've had a chance to enjoy the rigors and revision of formative assessment through a peer-review process. While our "best" project was due last week, we have the opportunity to consider peer formative criticism to improve our "best" work. How many of us have had a chance to revise our final? Last week, during a department chair meeting, I shared this experience with my colleagues. They were intrigued with the idea of having final projects due the week before finals. Doing so has allowed me to consider improvements, clarifications and revision of my project. The result will be better work. Further, it has made the learning process in this class more rigorous and relevant. Input from peers, some of whom are from very different fields, has been illuminating. It has caused us to see some of our blind spots and has revealed areas where we make assumptions about our learners. What I appreciate most, besides our great class and supportive instructor, is the fact that I'll actually use and share much of what I have learned over the past eight weeks. Thank you everyone!

Week 7 Final Project

How will we know as teachers that our students have learned? How can we assess that learning authentically? What tools will we use? How might those tools build a classroom community and enhance student engagement? These were some of the questions that I considered as I developed the final project over the past week. In the past, teamwork has figured heavily when I've worked on a unit. Usually, I'm working with my counterpart in the other building, or a social studies or English teacher; however, this project was more solitary. Nevertheless, I solicited input for English teachers, reading teachers, the summer reading assignment we have for incoming freshman and students from our online class. Yet, I see that before, I never really appreciated the magnitude of creating a new course solo. The other factor that became clear to me was the need for revision, field testing, feedback and validation. Wiggins talks this need for reflection and improvement, but now I see more clearly its importance. I know there will be things that I want to change in the future or that the teachers using it may wish to change, but for now I'm done. Where's the Sunday paper?

Week 6 Final Preparation

This week the blossoms for the final project began to set fruit. To continue the metaphor, my ideas have begun to germinate and extend beyond the initial seed. I'm excited that my project will fill a niche in our English reading curriculum and that my colleagues are enthusiastic about pursuing at least a rendition of this idea. In order to stretch myself, I explored the VideoPaper project and even began the outline of my final project there, yet I was concerned about lingering "known issues" even though the page is dated 2005. Thus, I decided it was time to develop the project differently. Knowing that I had at least one Animoto and one slideshow to embed, I decided to go with a wiki. In fact, the slideshow that I used is found on AuthorStream and I corresponded with the creator this week to make sure that I had permission to use her presentation.

I've used Wikispaces before, but learned a few new things as I worked on this. For one, I learned how to re-order my navigation page. Thank goodness for a rainy day! If you're wondering how to do so, click here. Fortunately, my presentations and videos embedded properly and I my sense of how to organize the final project continues to gel. In fact, I've decided that I'll probably write a paper in Word in conjunction with my wiki, because I plan to use the wiki, but might need the paper to fill in the gaps to meet the criteria of the rubric. My work-in-progress is here, but please don't post to its discussion board, because I'm still working on it. Plus, I finally figured out how to change the logo and added a picture of a teenager reading outside.

Meanwhile, as noted on the discussion board, I need to remember to have students self-reflect and provide surveys so that I can guide instruction/learning more effectively. To that end, I created this survey in SurveyMonkey. Since we've found in the past that students have a tenuous grasp on theme and character development, I decided to create a pre-assessment to figure out what they knew and didn't know. That link for my pre-course survey can be found here.

Finally, I received news that the grant for our book club books was awarded this past week and that the presentation of a colleague and I was accepted by the Illinois School Library Media Specialists Association. Not only that, but I canned 9 quarts of pickles and 6 more pints of raspberry jam from the garden. It's been a productive week. Now if I can continue this "flow" for the next couple of weeks, I'll be truly exhilarated. Set the sails!

Week 5 Bloom's Taxonomy

This past week we analyzed a case study not only for its adherence to the principles of Bloom's Taxonomy, but also for its strengths and weaknesses in adapting it into an online class. Probably not surprisingly, the class heavily depended upon read/view and respond. Because online classes, particularly asynchronous ones, depend so much upon the written word, this class would have needed to have some additional activities that would have provided other measures of learning, otherwise participating in the class would have been awfully tedious. That said, opportunities specific to online learning, would have provided for opportunities to demonstrate learning that fall into the synthesis category of Bloom's, an area where there were few activities in the class for student expression. For instance, students might have done a podcast, created a YouTube video or made a Jing to recreate their knowledge. As I consider ways of assessment in the online category, I posted this useful diagram of Visual Bloom, illustrating various 2.0 tools for the Bloom's categories.

Another article worth visiting in planning the final exam is Bloom's Taxonomy Blooms Digitally. This is a Tech Learning article with both of the Bloom's diagrams that the class utilized last week. In this article, Churches creates an extremely useful digital taxonomy map based upon Bloom's hierarchy.

The second piece of learning this week that has occupied my brain is effective objective writing. I still feel as if I'm not quite in the saddle for that, or that my horse only has three legs. It seems every time I think that I have a good objective something is missing. Nevertheless, I've settled upon the focus of my final project: Summer Reading Seminar. After discussing it with other people in the business, English teachers, reading teachers, curriculum people and tech people, I think it's a niche worthy of time and energy. Charge!

Week 4: Group mid-term

This week led to new challenges--no surprise there. Group work is often assigned as part of university classes; however, in traditional settings the group members see each other every week and, as a result, can easily meet before or after class to begin planning a project. Not so in an online classroom. Many students in online classrooms are doing so because of the unique ability to timeshift. Anyone with a DVR or Tivo understands timeshifting. The idea is that we participate in something at a time that is convenient to us. It is probably due to that fact that collaborating with group members and creating a firm project timeline was incredibly challenging for our group. This will give me something to ponder as I create rubrics for our students to help them surmount this issue.

While logistics were at times worrisome, my piece of the jigsaw was worthwhile and engaging. I was forced to consider Webex as a peer-to-peer application for assessment and really thought through some of its drawbacks and applications within a classroom. Considering these tools from the point-of-view of a teacher and then shifting point-of-view to the student yields different possibilities. I'm eager to read the work of other groups for their own insights and ideas.