Week 8 Journal and Reflection

I spent this final week of the Assessment in e-Learning class updating and revising my final project. I added a little information about the synchronous class sessions and a few more references.

As I reviewed each of the projects the other members of my class had created, I was impressed with the great work everyone did. I think the process of putting my thoughts into the final project helped me see how the activities I had selected will really work in the Career Planning class. The tech tools I selected should help my students stay engaged in the course.

I saved all of the reading materials and links so that I can use them over the coming months. All in all, it has been a very busy summer, but one that gave me a much better grasp of the variety of assessment tools I can use in the online classes I plan to teach in the future.

Week 7 Journal and Reflection

My Assessment in e-Learning class activities this week have all been directed at developing the final project for the course. I decided to use a web site for my presentation and selected Weebly because it allowed me to create the site at no cost. I found that Weebly has some useful templates for beginners (that would be me). Developing the site was relatively easy because the menus were simple to use. Tutorials were available, and I used them to get started. I found that I could easily remove or replace components that didn’t seem to work with my concept.

I always like to see photos and graphics on web sites I visit, so I wanted to use some when I developed my site. I had mixed feelings about the options available. Weebly has photos that are free as well as photos (much better ones) for a $5 fee. I chose to stay with the free photos. Even though there were thousands of free photos, most of them were not something I could use on my site. The many unusable photos made the process of finding something suitable a time consuming effort. I’m looking forward to reading the comments my classmates have after they see the site I created. I’ll be working on improving the site over the next week based on comments I receive.

Check out the site I created in the Final Project tab on this blog.

Week 6 Journal and Reflection

This week my focus has been on continuing to revise and improve the objectives for my course with a view to how all will fit into the final project. You can find my objectives as a sub-section under the Assessment Taxonomy Table tab.

With the close association of the objective and the rubric, I found that the readings for Module 6 helped me improve wording for my rubrics. When I think about rubrics I have written in the past, I had a fairly clear idea about what should be said at the “improvement needed” level and the “exemplary” level, but it was much more difficult to write about criteria for the levels that are between the extremes. I think that it might be these in-between levels that make a rubric seem like too much trouble to read when students say they don’t bother to look at them. How can I make my rubrics seem important enough that students will read and understand them—consider them part of the learning process?

 

Week 5 Journal and Reflection

Developing the taxonomy table for this week’s assignment was one of the more challenging assignments so far. I think I started over at least two times before anything I developed seemed like it could be usable. One of the articles from this week’s readings helped me think about the process a little better. The Macro vs Micro article by Nirupama mentioned that students learn faster and better if they know why they are learning something. The author also gave the example of crossing a stream by jumping from one stone to another. While these were not new concepts for me, the ideas served as a good reminder. I wondered whether I had ever asked students to jump from stone to stone without making sure they knew the real goal and their destination. I resolved to make sure I always state the things that seem obvious to me because those things might not be as obvious to my students. With that in mind, I was finally able to get the taxonomy table written and posted. You can see a copy of it in the tab at the top of the blog page.

During the next phase of my Assessment in e-Learning course, I will be turning my focus to the final project.

Week 4 Journal and Reflection

The required and optional readings for this week gave me some good ideas about ways to implement a variety of formative assessments into my classes. I have not tried the Exit cards idea (http://www.edutopia.org/blog/digital-media-exit-cards-matt-levinson), but I enjoyed the humorous example Levinson gave to show the need for making sure students got the point of the lesson. I’m looking forward to adding Exit Cards to the end of my class sessions to get feedback about the level of understanding students have gained. I can use the information students send to judge whether I need to repeat or expand my explanation of the concept the following day. In the past I have made notes to myself when I thought I might need to make changes the next time I teach the class. With Exit Cards, I can make adjustments immediately.

Most of the past week was spent working on a team project. I investigated TechSmith’s Jing (http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html) for my part of the team project. I created my account and learned as much as I could about Jing from the web site. I watched some of the instructional tutorials and made a few test videos using Jing and Screencast. Everything work flawlessly. In the past I’ve gotten good step-by-step instructions from teachers who have used Jing in peer-to-peer sharing of tips, but I have not used Jing in my own classes. After my experience this week, Jing will be another tool I am excited about including in my classes for the coming year. See the page called Team Project in this blog for the full report the members and I prepared on three assessment tools.

Week 3 Journal and Reflection

The main addition to the blog this week has been the concept map page. This map will help me visualize the Readiness for Employment section of a careers course I will be teaching. I used an application called Inspiration to develop the map. Initially I received a message that the software was not compatible with my computer, but I was able to get it to work by downloading to a computer with an older operating system. Teaching online is often about dealing with the idiosyncrasies of technology, and the concept map experience is an example of the challenges my students often face as well.

I’m looking forward to investigating the various assessment tools in the coming weeks. I am impressed with the capabilities of these assessment tools on our list, and I think I’ll be able to incorporate several of them into my classes in the coming year. Reusable Learning Objects have the potential for saving time from the teacher’s perspective and adding interest and involvement for my students.

Week 2 Journal and Reflection

Creating my first blog has been quite an experience—a very humbling one because using WordPress is new to me. I have had some difficulty getting the content of my site to look right. As a result, I am wondering whether some of the difficulties would be eliminated by upgrading to a paid version with more capability. For now I am going to assume that the problems are “operator error” and continue to try to learn the correct ways to edit and add content. I think videos can only be linked with the free version but that they can actually be embedded if I upgrade. Perhaps that is true of Word documents as well. So far I have not been able to put a Word document on my site. I can upload it to the library, but from there it does not show up on my page unless I add a link to the document. That means all of the formatting and appearance options are limited to what is available in WordPress. I hope to be able to fine tune things more as I continue to ready the WordPress instructions.

Week 1 Journal and Reflection

The first week of class had me scrambling to get out of teacher mode and back into student mode. The course content should significantly enhance my knowledge of assessment. I’m looking forward to picking up many ideas for my Business Electives classes. The Getting to Know You activity revealed an impressive level of expertise and experience in my classmates as well as the instructional personnel. I’ve bookmarked many links for future reference. I’m sure I’ll be coming back to these links often as I incorporate things I learn into my 2014-2015 classes.