Thinking EdTech: GRADE-ing Productivity

Saturday, October 11, 2008

GRADE-ing Productivity

I felt it was important to review the test with the students, so we began class doing that. I wanted to make sure that they understood the items that they had missed as I think that the concepts covered in the first unit are foundational to those presented in the rest of the course. We then segued into a discussion of what productivity tools are, how they can be used in education, and possible challenges teachers may experience in using them. I asked them to identify examples of productivity tool use in their content areas of interest and was pleased that many participated in offering their ideas. I tried to use some wait time instead of jumping in and giving some answers, which was somewhat difficult for me, especially in judging how long to wait without going into an uncomfortable stretch of silence. I'll keep working on it in future discussions, because I do want to give all students the chance to participate in discussions, including those who may need a little bit of thinking time before answering.

I did not think that we would have enough time in class to do a newsletter, so I combined the using a productivity tool segment with the segment on applying the GRADE process to Case #2. Only one student had ever used OpenOffice before, so I had the class create documents in OpenOffice Writer to record their responses. We read the case and then visited Indiana's Academic Standards website to find applicable standards. After determining the subject (High School Social Studies) and broad content area (United States Government), I gave the students a few minutes to look over the standards and benchmarks to find one that might apply. In sharing our findings, we saw that there were many that corresponded to this unit and even discussed that standards from other content areas might go with it as well. We then identified the overall learning goals from the case and wrote one objective. The students have struggled with being able to write specific criteria in their objectives, so I dwelled on this part of the objective we were writing to generate several possibilities for assessment criteria. We then noted the requirements listed in the case.

I then had them divide into groups of two or three and complete the A, D, and E steps of GRADE. We then came back together as a whole class and shared documents. It was neat to see what they had come up with and visit some of the sites that could enhance the unit, make teaching the concepts more effective, or improve the students' or teacher's efficiency in some way. I thought it was interesting that though there were six groups, no groups decided on the same resource.

We then went over the writing of an artifact proposal, which I explained would be similar to the activity we had just done except they would be generating an artifact related to their decided tool or resource. The students will be completing their first proposal for homework, and we will review it next week.

I then spent some time that afternoon grading some of the workouts. I found that I thoroughly enjoyed viewing their digital stories about why they had decided to pursue teaching. Some of them were so touching in that they mentioned and provided photographs or past teachers who had inspired them. This is an activity that would definitely like to do again in future semesters.

Labels: teaching, W200

posted by SG @ 10:33 AM

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