assessment and tech course

This has been a wonderful, frustrating, engaging, humbling and helpful week with technology.  I am very glad to have taken this course.  I am pleased and proud of the work I did and the skills I learned.  I leave with a solid plan for follow up on my new skills.  I am grateful to have a practical outcome from the class that I can both use in my classroom and share with my colleagues.  I appreciated all the collaboration from everyone in the class.  I learned a great deal from my classmates as well as enjoying these professionals who do a variety of different things at different schools. I especially appreciated Cathy’s strong knowledge base,  patience and understanding. Cathy, I will be in touch next week and you can expect me to contact you throughout the year as I try to find my comfort level in this new culture.

Well I was to have posted this on Wednesday and I thought I had but I did not succeed. Here I will try again.

My project has three components:

1. I developed a wiki and blog for use with my Psychology class. I want to use technology as a tool for a portfolio project and also as an aspect of assessing that project. I developed a WIKI for the class and posted the brain project, http://wayn-psychology08.wikispaces.com/, I included on that wiki an imported picture, links to internet sites and requirements for reflections on my blog. I then established a new blog specifically for the psychology class with the first two requests for comments form my stdents. I also established an account on a rubric site, rubistar.4teachers.org and posted the grading rubric for this project with a link on the wiki for students to find that rubric.

2. I am searching for a usable notecard and bibliography too to use with the students in our program on their research papers. I worked on notestar with Cathy yesterday but it is too cumbersome. Last night I suscribed to noodle, www.noodletools.com, to try their notetaking and bibliography tools for a month. I hope to enable us to hook certain kids on the need for using notecards in this process by using technlogy and also to have a tool the academic support teachers can check on without depending on the students to remember to bing their cards. It will also limit the loss of work that happens when students lose their cards. I am hopeful that I can find a tool or tools that will improve the efficiency of our students’ work time. I am investigating other sites today.

3. I wish to investigate the Lexia Program for support, enrichment and record keeping for our elementary readers and for our work with remedial readers. I will do this over the next week, outside of class. The reason this is important to me is that we currently need some sort of activity for delayed readers during their silent reading times each day. We also need some sort of objective assessment for classroom teachers on where their students are in reading. We need this without being driven by the scores, rather using scores as an aid.

7/31/07:

This has been an exciting and also frustration two days, which I am sure is normal.  I am very excited to learn all these new things  and frustrated by the amount of time it takes to implement anything, or to find what I actually want.  I guess it will just take time.  It is clear that the only way to efficiently get information from the Web is to have some knowledge of where to go and the only way to get that information is to find someone who knows where to go or spend lots of time with trial and error.  This feels like entering an unknown culture.  I actually think that is what it is.

For tomorrow I think what I need most is a chat about what I want for my project.  I think I want to develop a unit for my psychology class including a web page, a blog, an an assessment including a rubric for assessment.  The final product for the students  to include something written and maybe a wiki or a podcast or both or maybe I am being too ambitious.  I would like to clarify with you Cathy what it is I are doing and what my goals actually are.

I searched around for about 30 minutes and do not feel successful in finding educational blogs  that had any real value.  A few were too difficult to find my way around.  A few had video that did not work.  A few were all about personal lives and political opinions which are of no interest to me.  The one blog which looked hopeful on literacy had postings on using google in the classroom but I did not understand what they were talking about.  I could not find an introductory entry to explain what part of google they were referring or what it actually did.  I found the entire process fairly frustrating.

I was intrigued by the idea of using cell phones as a tool in the classroom. The article on Classroom 2.o was the most interesting and helpful, but I did read four related articles. I recommend these links.

http://www.techlearning.com/blog/2007/07/scissors_and_cell_phone

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/columns/executive_tech/article.php/

The idea that cell phones can be a tool is an eye opener for me. I fully intend to have my High School and Middle School students who forget to write down assignments, or write them down and then forget where they are written, to just take a picture of the class assignments from the board.

“New Skills for a New Century” is an excellent article presenting the idea that our students need new skills which require new approaches to learning and educating. It is such a challenge. The skills of higher order thinking, problem solving, oral and written communication, collaboration, responsibility, and self-management are goals for most educators. The problem for me is how to facilitate gaining those skills. I personally am able to assist students through research in the areas of communication and problem solving. Encouraging self-direction, creative problem solving, in other words project learning, is something I find difficult and daunting. It is however, exciting to think about. The obstacles for me are time, thorough preparation on my part, authentic and reliable assessment, and loss of full control over content and the direction of the learning. The key I think is collaboration in teaching, as well as the opportunity for collaboration in learning for the students. Providing experts for my students as part of the evaluation as well as seeking critiques from colleagues on evaluation tools is important for this approach. It is also a little frightening. It will require a certain amount of humility as well as an infusion of time. This approach, this paradigm shift, is of course an excellent way for my students with remedial needs to express their knowledge and share their strengths in problem solving, communication and creative thinking. I do struggle with how to use these ideas in remedial sessions with reading, writing and math. Creative problem solving also depends on a foundation of basic skills. The ability to read efficiently, write clearly and do basic calculations needs to be addressed for my students as well. I have found the best way to do that is through fairly traditional and linear approaches of instruction and practice. This combined with project learning I think could be quite powerful.

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