Absences are killing me!

Sorry, can't blog because I'm just keeping up with all the stuff - but doing it with less focus and vision because I'm not keeping my thoughts organized. Thank goodness it's break time. However, we're moving over break, so it's not going to be a picnic anyway. I do have a lot of work done. We've watched almost all of the projects, collected the myths, started OMAM, published the .mp3 files, and kept mostly caught up on grading (myth finals and myth projects excluded). Even got the kids' pictures with Santa. But man oh man is it busy here. Gotta go - pulling the data off the student surveys from Speak projects. Later. Have a good break if I get no time.

Still Busy

I'm still running around. I've gotta get the OMAM set up by chapters and post it. Also, I still want to get the few kids with the lowest grades a big pile of work to do over break. Finally, I've got the myth tests to grade (finished the Perseus already). Oh, and the final Speak projects. But all the craziest stuff is outside of school right now. Ideally, I'd get a big-picture grammar activity together for review after break.... Oh, need to print study guide packets, too for OMAM. Better move on now. Bye.

Busy, busy

For the moment, it's the stuff outside of school (especially selling the condo) that have me busiest. Christmas, kids, etc.
But since this site is for school-stuff, there's still a lot to say. First, today was end of the mythic hero unit except individual projects. The test and all was today. Projects Wednesday. Last new vocab today. Um, the test will require some grading - yuck. And I still have a few projects left. And the teacher graded parts of Perseus. Still to do - set up Of Mice and Men audiobook into chapters and run off copies of the study guide (I think I've scanned it already). Also, the end of grammar requires that I set up a common errors and how to handle them set of activities. Oh well. I need to do some errands today, so I'll probably get back on this tomorrow.

Progressing fairly well...

Looking back over my list from a couple days ago, I guess I'm making ok progress. I have most lesson plans for the semester done, and I have graded about everything except the last few projects and a scan test that won't scan. That scanner is giving me some trouble and I hope I can fix it. Goofy error where it tells me it can't scan the form and then it does but I have to hit enter twice before it will scan the next one. Argh. I think maybe it didn't like my two-sided OCR scanning and it's still trying to read both sides or something? Otherwise I'll reinstall it. Anyway, though, I have about everything else under control I think.

Another annoying note - my internet connection seems to be slower and less reliable, especially around 7/8 but really all day. And Computer 9 doesn't pick up the printer on start-up. I wonder if any do? Something else to look into, I guess.

I have been trying to integrate The Wisdom of Crowds stuff into my English class without really discussing it (because discussing it would go against the message). I have the students watching each project and evaluating them based on the four criteria that we discussed in class. Other than clapping briefly, we don't discuss them at all. I've converted their raw data responses so far to a grade and match them against my own evaluation. According to Surowiecki, I should just accept their grades. However, I have a couple doubts about the wisdom of this, though not based on an underappreciation of Surowiecki's thesis. Instead, I can't share all data - particularly any student's particular special needs. So they don't adapt their grades and can be a little brutal - though perhaps honest. Also, I don't believe the students are able to evaluate one of the four qualities reliably - organization and clarity of information. Nonetheless, I think they are giving a fair evaluation of the overall quality of the projects vis a vis each other as pieces of multimedia. They would also rate American News Programs over BBC News and would be right to say they are sharper to watch. However, if the criteria were changed from "I like watching this better than that" to "I am given more information more clearly", I don't know that they are ready (or that I have prepared them) for such a distinction.

Anyway, I'd better get back to work - last few pattern charts and those pesky scan quizzes. Site usage data to make up, too. Oh, and we've got an offer on our condo and have to figure out what comes next now. We've counter-offered and are probably close, so there's a lot to think about. Back to work... Enjoy the weekend.

Trying to stay focused.

The challenge is the balance of the big and small pictures. I have all these ideas about structuring and designing small-scale experiments and even creating collaborative exchanges for collecting, sharing and analyzing data that I would like to move forward on. But I also need to develop today's lesson (every day) and keep the Sharepoint site up, and the grades and the grammar and vocabulary. Experiment with coding. Move seats around. Put up with network errors..... Well, you see how frustrating it could get. In fact, being the only one who's supposed to read this, I could say I see b/c I do, of course. So this blog lets me try to balance both, and I'm happy for it. Really.

Little picture -
1. Enhance Agreement Activities by 7/8 so that you're collecting an accurate data set b/c this unit would be a good one to prep for the presentation to Dr. G. (I'll discuss that later).
2. Create a reduced Vocabulary activity for 7/8 for this week only.
3. Put together Theseus quiz and start gathering up your Oedipus materials.
4. Plan to launch your End of the Unit Mythology Project & Extra Credit Option.
5. Plan to present the students' Speak Research Projects and set up a plan for evaluating those projects with the students.
6. Set a schedule on the Sharepoint = Ideally - tomorrow and Thursday I think for project evaluations. So I can also wrap up Theseus Wed. and start projects. Start Oedipus Thurs and finish projects. End of the week quiz Friday and wrap-up Oedipus. Study over the weekend and Test Monday. Project work-time and OMAM set-up on Tuesday. Read OMAM Wednesday & turn in that project.
7. Grade that pile of stuff that's growing on your desk - notably the Patterns of the mythic hero as well as the open questions from the Perseus/Pattern quiz.
8. Build review materials for Friday's quiz.
9. Update Quia vocabulary from the past two weeks.
10. Figure out the final grammar subject of the semester
11. Put together missing work printed packets for Excel/PA students

That isn't probably the half of it, but close enough. I've got too much of a headache to drive myself crazy actually looking for more work!

Onto the big picture - I had better focus here before I got sick, but I've also lost some of the urgency here. Why? First, because the student-use tablets are scheduled for replacement next year! Yeah! Of course, that really isn't my goal - I want expansion. But it's a fair start. Also, I have decided to rest on grants for a moment and take that ball up later. When things have calmed somewhat. So there's less urgency to solve problems (or create them) right now.
But there are a lot of ideas swimming around in my head that I don't want to lose.
First, I need to continue exploring coding and improvements in how coding and reporting teach me what kids are learning.
Second, I want to finish that data study on Sharepoint/Website usage and grades. I had correlation data for 2 of my 3 classes (+.34) before the entire file disappeared off the face of the earth. I've started to rebuild that study.
Third, I want to get back with Edutek about Learning Series and Puzzleview.
Fourth, I want to get back to Examview (unreturned email!) about data-tagging but even more to query them about rubric grading. If we can return for a moment to the narrative (or any other rubric-graded assignment - I mean, in any case that usually a rubric graded assignment is an aggregation of seperately measured skills that may have been developed seperately as well) you have action, dialogue, details, character development, etc., etc. So, in theory, if there's a pre-test you could measure the growth of each of the seperate skills throughout the project and then evaluate the success of different interventions. For something recurring like lab reports or essays, you could design specific interventions based on shortcomings by the class as a whole or the needs of specific students.
A good interface could make grading easier for teachers as well. Checkboxes both for grades and for comments and a space for open-ended commenting as well. The checkboxes will help store data for the specific components being graded (focus, organization, support) but the comments should also be aggregated somehow as these are learning objectives or a failure to meet learning objectives. A clever application should be able to handle this and the company would be wise to promote the potential for using the software to track meaningful data within the flexible and myriad forms of authentic assessment.

Teachers who have this type of data collection resource could then measure the success of different interventions and share those in an exchange. Also, they could post experiments and seek others to replicate those in order to verify or modify their data. This would serve the interests of exactly those people who are avoiding the types of materials that I'm using now. Computer applications are good at justifying their continuation in districts because they provide SOME measure of effectiveness. To date, I'm not a big PLATO fan, but PLATO can tell me how much it has improved students' skills in specific domains. Now could I have improved them more using more interesting interventions. Oh, sure any teacher would say. But can you prove it? See, PLATO can, and as a result many schools, teachers, and even reading specialists(!) are replacing their reading specialists with PLATO because the numbers provide a defensible attempt to confront the problems of reading. Ideally, the collaborative would function as a check for teachers who post unreliable gains. Ironically, I trust schools and the government to trust PLATO's own statistics about their own productivity because (quite simply) they are statistics. On the other hand, I suspect that teachers' claims about their own effectiveness would not be credited EVEN if they, too, had statistics. The irony, not plain at first, is wrapped up in the motivations to lie. PLATO has a much bigger motivation and much more control over the data as well. But a high-quality collaborative could reconcile many of the doubts.

Well, anyway, I do have to go potty and eat and get back to those twelve things to do.

Later
Ok, that helps

Not such a productive month?

Well, I've blogged a lot less but managed to spit out some kidney stones, so there may be something in that. It looks like publishing the study guides my also be helping the grades (slightly) on the end of the week quizzes, too. I've stopped with quizshow b/c it was underused. Anyway, I've been thinking more about small-scale experiments and the next thing to bug Examview about is rubric grading. See, what other program is even close to collecting enough information about performance to think about isolating the components of a larger assignment - writing, project, lab, whatever - and collecting the grade. That way teachers can see specifically how activities in and out of class affect elements of a large assignment rather than just the overall assignment grade.

All of this is the child of my doubts. Specifically, I was concerned that too much of my focus is on computer-based curricula and that I wasn't questioning the quality of such material. This criticism is and is not true - I do use a lot of computer-based or at least technology-enhanced curriculum - but not because I don't doubt its value from time to time. Rather, this whole year seems an experiment in experimentation. Huh? I mean that I'm using technology to exploit applications that have the potential to measure incremental improvements in students skills and knowledge. Presumably, once I can figure out how to automate the isolation and measurement of specific goals then I can transfer that ability to more creative lessons. You see, I was thinking back to my days in George Hillocks' MAT program at the U of C and a specific experiment that another student and I conducted. We identified specific, goal-oriented lessons and tried to measure the effectiveness of each lesson. Then, we surveyed students on their enjoyment and the utility of each of those lessons. So, we ended up being able to compare/contrast the students' perceptions of the usefulness of a lesson with the actual usefulness in terms of increases in their scores. But, at that time, everything was hand-coded in Excel and we could only run an experiment like this because
1. we were young
2. we had to conduct research projects
3. we were only teaching 1 class a day for four weeks
4. we were teaching that class in teams of four people
5. we did not have families or other major responsibilities
6. we were surrounded by intelligent people whose abilities challenged and inspired us.
Not that I'm not surrounded by intelligent... But most teachers, like myself, have family obligations, clubs or teams, five classes, various school committees, and stuff going on that precludes private research studies. So - what do we know? My answer, unsatisfying, was that I know what I think I know. I blindly trust perception. So all this technology in my class has made me curious because I can run some small scale experiments relatively easily to see if specific interventions change students' scores. It's, perhaps, not as fun as conducting sound and vision lessons and seeing what the incremental change in the use of sensory details is during a unit on writing personal narratives. But I do begin to see ( or perhaps smell) how that could also be automated with good coding, and I never could have thought of that without the raw data of grammar and vocabulary lessons (which aren't exactly pointless, anyway. Especially with ACT's in the PSAE.

Well, gotta go.

Tired - Post Progress Reports...

I'm so irritated. Somehow the xlsx file with site usage data is gone. There's still a shortcut to it on the recent documents list as a doc that was on the desktop. It's not in the trash can. Where did it go? I was ready to run a full report looking for all those cool correlations between site usage and grades. Arrgh! So is it worth it to re-run all of that? I think so. Grades have changed and so has the site usage data, but it's still worth it. But not today.

Grades were due today and I submitted them but had to leave off the Speak projects because too many came in yesterday and today and there just wasn't time to grade them fairly. I also still need to work in time for the class to watch Speak projects but now we're on to archetypes and the Pattern of the mythic hero... so it doesn't really fit well. I also demonstrated the scanner today, but it wasn't so polished and camtasiad. Oh well.

Later.

Hope that's over!

Kidney stones and a kidney infection. Worse than kidney pie (and not the kind of thing a person needs to experience more than once!) So I'm home recuperating from a night at the emergency room a couple days ago and waiting for my follow-up appointment. Nick's obsessed with my computer and I won't get much done if I can't get beyond that. Also, there's a million things to do around here from generic housework to decorating for the holidays. So I guess I'll keep it short. Haven't done anything since the last post anyway, so what's there to say except all the old news is current and now the time-lines are collapsed. Wednesday AM I need to present scanner and I'd prefer to do it by camtasia for the sake of not having to repeat it for numerous 1:1 conferences.

BTW - I need to scan Of Mice and Men stuff, anyway. So at least I have sample material. Oh, and I still need to grade any Speak make-ups as well as Ch. 8 and studyguides PLUS the presentations that the students made. Yikes! And Midterm Progress Reports are due Wednesday by 4. and Nick is still a pain, though cute. I'll try to feed him in a minute.

A good goal would be to have a schedule up by the end of the day and a decent plan for the storyboard for the board presentation and the essence of a plan for the early start. Unfortunately, a lot of my stuff for OMAM and Mythology are hard-copy documents, so it's hard to figure my plan from home. Oh well. Off and running. Later.

I lost it at the finish line..

So it was such a big week and today was the day to wrap up and get the projects secured in the drop folder. Finally. The kids had been after school every day this week. Almost everybody is working hard.

But I couldn't go another day. I'm just too sick. I feel bad about it b/c I just left subplans for the test and said "tell the kids to put projects on the Drop folder", but I'll clean up Monday.

I think I need to nap now. So just a couple comments -
1. still need to get the stupid activity log to bg.
2. ran most of the report except period 10 grades on the relationship between sharepoint use and grades. I'll wait, oh, never mind. With just p2 and 7 and grades that kind of just stop at the end of the speak test (but not the project) and don't account for the make-up work that I haven't graded yet, there is about a +.34 correlation between grades and the sharepoint usage. But that's seriously incomplete reporting, so take it with a grain of salt. I wonder, also, if I just stuck in zeroes for no internet connection and 1 for internet connection if there would be a reliable correlation between internet at home and site usage and internet at home and grades. Just a thought. Anyway, that project is pretty close to done, so that's something to be thankful for. Also, the Speak stuff is wrapping up. That's good, too. Of course, that means that there's more to come. Ugh!

I did improve the data tagging on sentence structure and sentence errors - however... I need to switch my hierarchy a bit. Right now, I have it set so that the National and Local standards are broad - grammar, sentences or parts of speech, and the national is specific - fragments or verbs, and the Learning Objective is most specific - phrase fragment or transitive verbs or something. But since the CPS only runs any reports at all on the State Standard and I'm doing week to week testing, well then I want to know with good accuracy what's missing on the review games. PS - the review game this week really showed me that review takes a lot of time. How to speed up review activities and still keep them meaningful?

Where should I go next with grammar? I was thinking that a review is needed for the end of the semester, so I've got to get ready for a logical wrap-up fairly soon. Let me check on what units are left and get back to me later. Also, can I do a mythology and pattern of the mythic hero unit in 10 days?!? I know that I can teach OMAM in 10 days, though perhaps I lose something doing that. But Mythology plus the project in 10 days? I'm gonna have to repeat "I Think I Can" over and over - or maybe just lay out a careful calendar.

I hope I can get some work done this weekend. Amy wants me to burn some CD's of books for her friend, so maybe that will be one way for me to do it. Work while I burn. Right now I need to rest a bit.

The pain is amplified

I have added to my troubles, and though I've taken medicine to reduce the excruciating pain, I have a severe headache that no ibuprofin is touching. I also feel a bit fevery. Woe is me.

But there's stuff going on in life, so I update myself on these events for no good reason.
First, Took some more video of kids working quietly and the afterschool posse yesterday (projects are due and LOTS of kids came after yesterday [probably today, too]). I have to take video of the remote games today during 7/8 as well.

Speaking of the remote game - I used CPS as a class today to review the new grammar exculsively - didn't want to take up too much time. I also asked a few basic questions like "do you have internet access at home" "how much do you use sharepoint" and asked about specific apps (quia, quizshow, study guides).
So where did these questions come from? Our board is beginning to insist that we all have a web page, our teacher's association says it's a working condition issue, and the questions set down on the table include, to paraphrase, do these really have any impact, anyway? A good question, I thought. Since Sharepoint allows site usage data to be stored for each user, to a degree I can measure how many times each person is accesssing the site. Then, I decided to cross-reference that with grades (1st quarter and current) which i'm entering now. Then, I thought, it would be useful to know how many kids were not accessing the internet site because they didn't have the internet at home, so I asked that survey question. A little time in the near future should be spent looking for any meaningful correlation. Then I'll send this back to HHSTA with whatever I've found and suggest ways that people could actually design an intelligent experiment to determine real correlations - looking for kids whose data sets are similar EXCEPT their Sharepoint usage and then track progress. Large numbers make this easier than small numbers.

Interestingly, I also posted some questions to ask students how often they are accessing other resources as well as using the sharepoint site. Actually I already have that info, but it will be interesting to see how reliable they are.

Well, now I've go to set up period 7 and finish that data set. I also want to storyboard my presentation for the board and there are grant deadlines coming up. I have other stuff I'm sure, but I feel a little too sick to worry about it now. I need to stop taking on any projects until I finish a few. Oh, and speaking of finishing... When my students finish the Speak and Speak Project unit, I need to have a good plan for mythology and related skills. Ouch.

Later.



oh - gotta post those quizshow qustion sets, too...

The brutal agony

I am in extreme pain so I'll keep it short.
I did - make Speak test, contact edutek about learning series and puzzleview (they'll send updates on usb), contact examview about CPS/Examview integration (emailed a reply - out of office but will get back to you soon). It doesn't seem like I did much else... OH YES! Now I remember, I hacked around PLATO a whole bunch to see if I could wrest any more use from it. And it was pretty useful. There was an entire grammar scope and sequence in FasTrack language arts which looked pretty promising. Also, I went through the types of reports that can be generated using FasTrack and found some good and simple site usage feedback that I think will help improve accountability day to day (or use to use).
Oh, I also used the flip to do some class captures on video that I can use in my presentation for the board. I realized today that I should storyboard that bad boy just like I make my students do. So my own assignment kicks in now.

Also, K. A. has figured out how to grasp and grapple a bit and I couldn't be happier. She commandeered a half dozen unused tablets and will start integrating them into class during the third quarter. That's the way to get things done - hunt down resources and use 'em good! I wonder what she's gonna do with them?! I imagine we'll talk as she gets closer to deployment. She's doing a lot of cooperative group learning stuff so the 1:4 ratio might work great for her.

Well, I got a lot of pain and discomfort to work through today and I don't think I'll tell you any more about it. Just can't wait to get home and take some medicine or something!!!

Well, students are taking Speak final tests, so I want to get them on camera working. Later.

Quick update to avoid forgetting

Contact PLATO or Pointperson and find out about ACT modules and why parts of speech modules are dead.

Contact Examview and ask about Learning Series updates.

Contact Examview to question reports across tests for gains and non-credit data columns for tracking introductory to final acquisition.

PS - Can't feasibly afford PhD, but somehow I will still push on. Still need to do grant requests and pump up the program promotional activity. Need Speak Test (not a big challenge, though). The next few weeks, I will abandon the class to class evaluation of tech intervention for test prep and instead do a week of one thing, a week of another, a week of another and test the product with the classes functioning as a whole. That way, if a kid is out I don't think it will skew the data so much. Plus, the constant absent kids will outly themselves by missing at least one test, and then I'll have to dismiss their data for all three weeks. Is that a good thing?

Well, I gotta run.

Stress is excitement without the promise of gratification

So why am I slightly stressed? I think just because I don't have clear plan, so here goes...

A new prime directive (self-assigned) is getting into a doctoral program so that I can explore the role and value of instructional technology in the classroom. Let's make something clear, it's not that I think that technology is good teaching or that outstanding teaching requires technology. Instead, there seems to be a nexus of intellectual curiosity and improved teaching (for me) right at that spot. I would look specifically for a few different roads to hoe: 1. How can teachers improve their abilitity to design and measure mindful and meaningful experiments every day. I want to undermine the notion that an experiment is an exceptional event that requires the intervention of the University and countless other resources. Instead, I posit that teachers run experiments, without knowing it, from moment to moment and day to day. However, we rarely recognize the experiment, review the data objectively, alter the conditions, or apply the results consciously. I want to encourage the development and use of software as well as the cooperative collegial habits that would normalize experimentation within the classroom. Handling a student's tardy entry into the classroom is an experiment - a combination of words or actions meant to bring about some desired eventuality. We often assume that these aren't experiments because we codify them and they become policy. Nonetheless, they are experimental. Whether we go on to collect the data that determine whether or not this experiment was successful depends mostly on the curiosity of the teacher and the recognition that this was, indeed, an experiment. Instructional technologies now allow us to collect much more data on the moment to moment learning that goes on in the classroom. The combination of these data-rich technologies with the habit of analysis should allow teachers to develop more effective and gratifying methods and materials for instruction.
Hey, what am I selling here, anyway? 2. Technology offers individual students the opportunity to learn in atypical environments. The practice of scenario-based teaching has allowed students to temporarily adopt a role that requires learning (as opposed to the identity of a studious dweeb or whateve). Now computer-simulations and avatar-based identities expand the ability that teachers and schools have to immerse students in purposeful learning.
3. Districts and schools are still using an outdated model of technology budgeting and management. This is evident to me in the continued focus on hardware and software as supplemental rather than integral to the educational process. I see a day coming when the textbook is the side-item and the DVD (or whatever new form) is the actual product that is purchased. And this is the smallest example, a minute case study, of how technology must and does alter the reality of the material aspect of learning. Additionally, the model of technology experts determining network and hardware configurations while teachers are consumers of the trickle-down systems has to change if we want to maximize the ways that teachers can use technology to improve student learning.

Well, those are some of my basic ideas as I consider applying to schools. The big budget items - in terms of time, of course. There is never enough of that currency above all others - include writing essays, practicing for the GRE, and examining the particular professors and programs that would serve me best.

Beyond all that, of course. There is an 11/30 deadline for a grant program and two others in December. There is an immediate need to develop materials that pump up my 1:1 program in English I and expand it to English II. I need to camtasia Vision and the scanner over the next couple weeks for the district/English department respectively. Now ask yourself, does ANY of that have to do with your regular job of teaching English to high school students?

So what's going on in class? I probably mentioned that I posted up practice tests using Examview for student review for this week. So now we have all the following supplemental materials: Quizshow practice sets, Quia games, Examview practice tests. Geez - but a student who actually uses these tools claims that all of this is more than enough for vocab and class notes, but not enough for grammar. Back to the drawing board. Maybe the sample examview tests will be enough.

The extra credit is going well, but only among A and B students. That could be an experiment rather than a complaint - what is the relationship between extra credit completion and student achievement and what variables can be manipulated in order to change that relationship? But who has time? That's what I mean - teachers need a clearinghouse for experiment design, conduct, and publication and it's NOT the intervention of the university that will solve this. That doesn't inculcate the habit but reinforces the notion that the outside actor and the extreme event are part and parcel of an experiment. But I digress. Extra credit - ok but not what I hoped.

Pragmatic stuff. I need to grade all study guides today and give them back. Then I can't take any late ones - oh well. But I need to let them study. Study? For what? I also need to make a test and the necessary study materials for the novel Speak. So they can study in class for a bit tomorrow and then take a test Wednesday. In the background, they will work on their projects while not reviewing or testing. Thursday is simply review for the Friday test plus more time on projects. Friday is the end of the week quiz and "Show me the Project" day. Ideally, I would have a survey on the Sharepoint so they could evaluate each project as they watched it. Then the students could see each others' honest reactions to their videos and I would have some help evaluating them. BTW - as this comes closer it becomes obvious to me that I should have developed a more clear rubric that would be used at the end of it all. Oh well.

Once we finish the whole speak/speak project thing, I need to plan for OMAM. and Mythology. And Grammar and Vocabulary, of course. Oh, by the way, if I'm still sane and teaching this program next year, I think I will approach grammar differently. I've gotten lost in the terminology a bit and the focus is not enough on the end result - the ability to speak and write correctly and to recognize and correct errors in written English. This mandate brought to you by the ACT... I need more, and more specific, ACT-style grammar questions as part of the practice of teaching grammar. Blah, blah... Back to my basic planning - Announce OMAM book buy today and assign it for the last week before break and the week after. In the interim, teach the mythology unit with a focus on the pattern of the mythic hero and the end project of creating their own story that follows the pattern. Creative Writing - what a treat.

But if the goal is the pattern of the mythic hero... and OMAM does not follow the pattern of the mythic hero... then how do these things fit together??? They don't. I don't think I need to because there's a valid final assessment, or at least one that feels final. Oops, just spent a bunch of time talking with Walter which was useful but didn't get the dishes washed! I'm gonna eat and grade study guides. Then I've got to brainstorm some questions for the Speak final and final review. Later.

Psst. I had to ditch the Examview round-up over at Central only because I need to be in class this week.

Happy Turkey Day

So the kids are watching the Camtasia videos, their grades are up to date, the Quia games now have all the class terms through last week, th is coming to work with me on the upgrade to surflock 2.1.3, students seem excited to make their projects... Something must be looming besides that aweful activity log. Freerice extra credit might be too high - giving away about a billion points. But we've collected over 50,000 grains of rice, and that's at least a pretty heavy sack I imagine. And the kids are bringing more and more sanitary wipes to keep our computers clean.

There are some things that need to be done, of course. First, I have grant proposals to do and the deadlines are approaching. Second, I need to gather up materials for the coming units - OMAM and Heroes. Third, I need to move ahead with grammar and so plan those units. Fourth, I need to at least fix my tagging of data as I plan ahead, if not retrofit some of the tags on old assignments. Ideally, I could create a Final Exam Grammar Pretest with questions that accurately pinpoint strengths and weaknesses. Also, I want to start putting up study guide tests that contain exactly twice the number of questions on the exam with 1/2 of them actually appearing there. In other words, for next week's vocab quiz, I create a test with 100 questions and post it as a study guide. Then I make the actual test with 50 of those same questions. Same for grammar - study guide 10 pos, 10 sentence parts, 10 phrase/clause, 20 compound/complex/run-on and give half of them. Same for class notes except maybe 25 things or so. I could assign the study guide the first time and then let them know it's there in the future. Should I also play the games with that same set? I think so....

So how would the standards work best? Obviously LO, nat, state, local are ideal. On the study guide, reference becomes an active tag. On the CPS, it's keyword. Is it really worth coding these tags for the single application here or there that uses them? What about making the study guides worth insurance points? In other words, you don't have to do them, but if you turn one in, I'll add 10 points to your quiz (30 points total if you do all three). But only for those students whose quiz average falls under 85%. Jerk. Why not let kids just get a million points if they're gonna do the work? Let's experiment with it, anyway. Ugh, does that mean that I have to retrofit all the old banks with tags? Yes. Does it mean that I have to go back and pick out the right sample questions and make sure they have the right tags when doing the verbs thing? Yes. Also, somewhere in all that, I have to go back and clean up some of the folder and subfolder organization of this stuff. Yikes. Sometimes I wish that I were one of them Type A organized people or whatever you call them. But then would I experiment with so much stuff before I really knew what I was getting into? I guess not.

In the near future, after grants and self-promotional video to urge second lab, I need to cobble together a quick how-to camtasia for the scanner and for Vision. The fun never ends. I think I'll do the Examview for now, though.

Happy Turkey Day.

A little bit of madness...

So just when it seems like I've got a handle on things and can start adding some new elements to the class, a new problem pops up. My projector died! So instead of showing the videos on the over head for "how-to use moviemaker", I ran in and put the files on the Thawspace drives of all the classroom computers! Then I created a quick .htm doc that puts them in order. In p2 today I had to have the kids manually start up. Now I see how to launch it on all desktops from AppControl using the T:drive file. Pretty cool - they log in and I launch the tutorials. But it was about 25 minutes to update all those stupid machines. But it worked.

Now I've already got my projector back because I took it down and did an end-around of buildings and grounds. The awesome A/V director installed a new bulb and filter. Now I've just got to hook it back up. Maybe between 4/6 and parent visits. Speaking of which - I better get to work setting up those parent visits by printing out grade reports.

In other news, th and I are emailing now about upgrading the vision in this lab and moving it to the school level. Sounds like more camtasia's to me, but I'll be glad when this stuff is in wide use. Also, I should poke my head up a bit so that I'm visible when I'm asking for new equipment for next year.

Almost half-finished updating Quia with the class notes and grammar - that'll be nice. Also, posted my first examview study guide (then deleted it b/c it was outdated). Looks very easy to use and I'll certainly start producing them for the students to practice on.

The extra-credit for freerice.com thing has hit a bit of a snag - I have collected a lot of rice, but a couple students are submitting sheets that put them at level 5 or 7 on their print-outs. Now, an avg student is around level 24. An excellent student in the low-mid thirties. But my student with a 98% average is on level 7? I just had to say NO, even though there were 5000 grains (and 200 points) at stake. It's just insincere or I'm just mean. Either way, I love that these kids are donating, but that's not a fair way to do it.

Oh goodness, I also have to log every minute that I've spent on student council for the last year somehow. I better go.

Turkey Day Madness

Not really. There's nothing very exciting going on. Implemented a new keyboard cleaning measure and plugged freerice.com some more. A peculiar note, my school is blocking freerice.com?!? But not YouTube. How bizarre.

I looked back through the Examview manual and did not see a way to run a Learning Focus report from test to test except manully (select each test separately and then type in the results in Excel) but I did see some cool stuff.
1. You can click a button to display names of kids in the target range - know right off who needs help.
2. You can publish tests and study guides to the web without needing the examview server. The study guides are just practice tests. Cool.

Another piece of good news - the flash movies on using moviemaker do seem to play on most machines! Also, I've graded and posted study guides 3 and 4! but still need to do 5, 6 & 7 :(.

I think (just for kicks) I should try to build a practice test to post on the web and enter all class terms and vocabulary used so far onto quia. Wouldn't that be fun? Then in the background all I need to do is write 3 grant proposals and create a multimedia pitch to expand the program. Is that really all? Well, for next week I need to gather compound/complex/compound-complex resources and put together a Speak Final Exam!!! Oh well. Off to the races, I guess.

Quick hits before Thanksgiving week...

For right now, need to finish Speak studyguides (sections 3 and 5 [did 4 out of order]) and create a Speak section 6 quiz. Light week since kids are just moving forwards a chapter in speak an dthen watching the how-to videos on Moviemaker. Oops, they can only watch them in front of the class, but not on their machines - old flash players. I think I could create WMV's and if I were kind I could even put them on their T: Drives. That would keep me busy. Another thing to do would be to update Quia with class notes and important terms. Well, that would be good, too. So, not such a light week, but I guess it seems that way because there are only three days and it's lighter than usual. I'll fill in the details later - hey, never even ran the results on the Friday tests. Think I had key folks out, so I just didn't want to post fallacious data. Also, I broke my own rules this week. I didn't run Period 10 on solo QuizShow but put them on CPS b/c they weren't on computers already anyway, so it would have eaten up too much time just to log them in and have them download the stuff to their T drives. That was one good thing about the other program we used this summer for lab management (Crosstec Schoolvue), it had a feature for dropping stuff off on the client computers and you could control the receiving directory. On Vision, I can share a doc or run an app., but I can't just dump files into their computers. I don't think..

So here are the preliminary results - well, the two classes using CPS walloped the period 7 class using QuizShow in all categories. Period 10 showed this dramatic turn-around - after being 5+ points under average in grammar last week, they're slightly above average this week. Could be solo quiz show. Could be other things. Have been thinking recently that kids need more repetition with the grammar stuff, but not sure how to give it to them without just forcing worksheets down their throats or requring internet access.

Started extra credit for freerice.com and got my first student's result - 3,000 grains! Not bad nameless kid. A great chance for some extra credit here.

Well, I've gotta get to work grading and test-making and folding laundry.

Happy Friday!

I am completely guilty of procratinating and promise to stop in exactly seven minutes. So in that time here's the update, I looked over Examview's reports again and think that some combination of keyword, state standard and learning focus might be enough to run some fairly intelligent reports. The output is largely based on proficiency and you can change proficiency targets. As far as I can tell, you could run a single assignment proficiency report or a proficiency report across a range or even semester. But you could not mechanize a comparison between a proficiency report at one time and another. Hmmmm. That sounds too complicated; let's start over.

You can run Learning Focus and Performance summary reports on Learning Objectives, Nat,State, and local standards.
You can run Item Remediation Reports on Learning Objectives, Keywords, and State Standards. However, Item Remediation does not include local or state standards. But Item Remediation is the only report that ties a single test item to multiple standards, and so the only way to cross-reference a single item.

Be right back. Talked to David A. about options for a second classroom, including compromising the tablets, recycling furniture, and even (desperate measure) using the tablet labs that are dying from lack of use in Social Studies and Math. I think if we make it clear that we're going to carry out this program, we'll get more support. Dave is always a supporter. Should have showed him the Reading lab lesson he said - scan to OCR page, kids ink on that to demo glossing, show on the overhead, print to .pdf, post on sharepoint and voila - you've got the class-made model of glossing online that same day. Anyway, I told him about it and he said - let me know when you're doing these things. ok ok...

Back to Examview - it's been more than seven minutes - any %improvement could be tracked if I'm more specific in tagging. It seems that the tags on difficulty, reference, topic, misc, notes might only be useful for building tests because they never come up in the reports. But if I tagged L.O. and state standards well I could improve remediation reports. If I tagged L.O., state, local, and national standards better, I could look at category and subcategory performance. However, the only way to measure across assignments (I think) would be to manually type them into excel, right? Well, I could export the cps to .csv. Can I export an examview assignment to CPS? It seems to have a better way of analyzing student performance on a standard, though only the state standard is indexed. I think. I was supposed to cover something else here, but I can't remember what it was...

Good Vibrations

I feel some positive momentum coming on. First, um, to keep people anonymous, tech support agreed to work with me today to upgrade surflock. I hope this is a good thing. Second, sat down with Mark (I don't think he'll care if I use his name) and discussed the future of computers and the English Department. I think he was pretty receptive to what I wanted to do - Expand the program either into the sophomore level or another classroom at the freshman level. Also talked for a long time with a person who I think would be great to run a second lab and she's definitely excited about it. I really do think she'd do a great job, too. So Mark and I discussed the value of the program and what we could do to present this to the Board. We also talked a bit about costs and the possibility of using computers other than tablet PC's (which is ok for me). Anyway, the thrust is that I've still got to do something that ties together this program and sells it - I'm thinking a short Movie Maker presentation accompanied by a rather long report.
In class - kids are rolling forward on projects, clauses and phrases are still as hard as ever, I'm 2 chapters behind in Speak study guides. Thanksgiving is coming. Hoping the SurfLock upgrade works well and we can throw it out to the entire school. Still have grant proposals to go through. Ok, Ok. Back to work - btw cps in p2 was pretty bad - 40.63% on 15 items. Mind you, these are the same items we went over on Tuesday (slightly different questions, but still phrases and clauses). And I can't pull the data from Quizshow so I won't know if it was just p2 that bombed or all of em. And since the quiz on Friday is cumulative and I can't do a percentage report on particular items, I can't compare that 40% to anything that I learn on the quizzes. I don't think. Maybe I should look more closely at percent correct reports on tagged elements. Later.
I'll tell you how the surflock installation goes, too.

Good Job

Hey, I just read back through this and I'm doing a pretty good job of giving myself stuff to do and then getting it done. It seems that I have to mention a thing a few times to get it going, but then it does get going. Who would have guessed that I'd have done so much on the project and produced 8 camtasia videos in the last week or so. Of course, now the camtasia vids won't run in the room b/c the computers can't update flash player. Ha! But I could go back and produce them again with retro settings. Geez. Still, not impossible - just time consuming. Also, still can't make camtasia theater work - so i've got the videos but a lame menu. The theater comes up but then freezes.

But the thing for me to repeat is that I need to make grant requests. Verizon has a good one (thinkfinity, really), then IRA and GenevaLogic. I need to do something along the same lines for my own district as well. Also, look into getting the Flip fixed because part of my promotion should have video of the class and students in action.

BTW, review for this week (which I haven't made yet) should stay the same as two weeks ago - I think that's period 2 CPS, 7 Quizshow teams, 10 quizshow solo. So I need maybe 20 questions on grammar and 20 vocab saved in 2 separate banks called week 12 vocab review and week 12 grammar review. That should work. I'll let you know how it went tomorrow or Friday.

Finished The Shipping News, which I loved. Now I'm listening to Steven King's Cell and hope that it will get better. It's free, after all. It's on cassette from Amy's coworker. I'll take what I can get. Goodnight.

Not a lot of time...

I don't have a lot of time because I'm going to watch Joe L's Camtasia tutorials. Today is the parent visit day and grades are due, too. My grades are mostly up to date except some Speak study guides, so I handed out grade reports and posted grades like a good boy. Grades now are a lot higher than last quarter, but I haven't yet filled in zeroes for missing quizzes and excused absences.

The parents were probably unimpressed b/c today just happened to be a workday on our research projects. I can't really worry, though. The kids need time to download stuff that goes along with their storyboards and today was as good a day as any. Projects are moving along well, though I'm not convinced that many kids will really have all their stuff ready to go on Tuesday next week.

Still on the to-do list - complete two grant applications and create some kind of presentation to convince the administration to re-tool this classroom (five-year-old out of warrantee tablets) and perhaps to outfit a new classroom as well. I talked to Katie H. briefly and David Anderson as well and both seem ok.
On a shorter leash - I need to create a review activity for the remotes/quizshow for tomorrow, a test for Friday, a speak section 5 quiz for friday. I think that's it. Actually, I've been in a lot worse shape than this before!

I'm off to watch the camtasia's, though I'm sure that there's something that I'm forgetting here....
Later

Oh the joy of grades

So 1/3 term grades are due already. As a quick procrastination, here's the link to all the camtasia tutorials for using windows moviemaker. Can't say I like to hear my own voice, but it should save me some repetition.
http://www.hinsdale86.org/staff/smoore/speak/tutorials/speak%20presentation%20tutorials.htm
Also, just for the record, I used CPS with all three classes to intro clauses. Seemed to go best in 7th and worst in 10th. I wonder if that's true. Let me check.
Period 10, 13 questions and average was 48.95
Period 7, 16 questions and average 48.86
Period 2, 16 questions and average 43.44
So the problem with period 10 wasn't wrong answers at all, just rushed for time. That's why data collection is good. Perception's a faulty indicator sometimes.

Also, Speak quizzes were excellent, so it's now just a matter of getting the last few people on board. I think that the class is so hard that students are relieved to have a book that's simple and even fun. Poor kids. They are working hard!

Back to the grind, but not for long. Pentweb is frozen so I'm going to bed soon.

I kind of like blogging..

So I've done this for a couple weeks and I really enjoy taking a mooment out to get my thoughts together. But I don't have much time to celebrate the quiet reflection time...

So, here it is. I made a cool menu-type camtasia but it doesn't work. I think it's too big so I'm shrinking it down. I'll link to it from here if I ever get it to work... Right now I'm redoing it on the other computer. Also, I asked for more space for my network drive and I'm sure that's a go. That should help. Also, Genevalogic (a good product for lab monitoring software) has an upgrade for Surflock so now I'm begging tech to let me install it and see if it's all good. There's now some clamoring for access to the scanner - and for good reason. It's an awesome tool. Also, I met yesterday with Foreign Language (i guess since this is public i won't use people's names) and talked about Quia. Pretty cool ideas. I was inspired and came back and updated my three quia games (synonyms, antonyms, and definitions) to include all 55 words that we've covered so far. Also, I introduced new grammar (clauses) in class and then did CPS with the class (p2) on 16 problems so that they could try out the new skill (and a little phrase review). Actually, class was packed. Quiz speak part 4, intro grammar, CPS 16 grammar questions, Show Camtasia video on finding and saving images, sounds, and songs, remind them to bring USB drive for the next day or two. I created new seating charts for p7 and p10 and now I want to update CPS so I better get to it!

Side note - two grant applications. One from Geneva - write an essay and get a license for free. One from IRA (not the Irish Republlican Army) but it's reading based to I'll have to see what I can do. The main grant proposal is unassigned but implied - I need to make a presentation that will convince the Board to buy new computers and at least retool this lab if not setting up more. I HAVE TO DO THAT, even though nobody's asking for it. I bet there's a lot of money in the world...But not so much time. Back to work.

Monday, Monday..

So this weekend the kids started getting sick - who knows what my attendance will look like this week. However, I have a well-organized plan and hope I don't have to miss anything. If I do - perhaps the project videos will be enough to get me through the work days. I can also discussion board them live from home, in theory.

Read over the weekend that a teacher posted something about religion, gospel music, blah and everybody's buzzing. That didn't really concern me as much as the peculiar possibility that someone actually reads these things. Perhaps a stats person could read this and explain what justified boundaries for eliminating outliers might be so that one person who usually gets a 20% on every assignment doesn't skew all data by being absent. I really need to talk to examview about reporting and exporting to excel... Oh, also, the teacher mentioned reading the paper in homeroom I guess and got in trouble. Let me state here and now that I work all day long so there you have it.

I have finished recording the how-to camtasia's. I posted the first couple - intro to the project and collecting images and sounds. Now I have chopped up the how-to movie maker and I'm going to try to do one of those cool tabs-on-the-side-collections movies. Wish me luck. Oh, and I"m running out of space on my H drive to make these things, too.

I think that I really need to read my last blogs to figure out what I'm behind on, but since I was on the site, I posted what I've got so far. Well, I think I'll be back later today. Walter's out so I'm looking over his kids' shoulders today.

New Tests, New OCR's, and old problems...

The old problem is just that I can't get the how-to camtasia right so I'll try again 9th.

The new test results will be in at the end of the day so I'll get back to that. The main point here is that I need to pull together a to-do list and then get back to work quickly. For today I HAVE TO finish that camtasia. For Monday/Tues voc words 51-55, Intro Clauses, Collect StoryBoards, Speak Quiz Sections 3 and 4, Clauses Pretest, and, um, well the intro to MovieMaker of course. Oh, and today pick up dad at the airport, remember to tell Amy that there aren't copies of old newspapers, and follow up on Genevieve's folders. Oh, and Quia - add more stuff to Quia games and check out what Fran's doing with it.

Speaking of new stuff, hard time downloading videos off the iFlip today. I think it's my fault for updating the driver. Oops! On a good note, I started playing with the OCR capabilities of our totally awesome scanner today and, well, it's totally awesome. I've got Oedipus and Perseus as real text documents now. Totally manipulable, very exciting and very easy to do. I did that plus a million other things when I was procrastinating from Camtasia. In fact, now I'm procrastinating grading the last batch of study guides so I'll get back to work.

An unproductive hour or two

So I tried to make the Camtasia How to Use MovieMaker thing but didn't do so well yet. It's too long. Maybe I need to chop it up into chapters. - Stage one, gathering notes and storyboarding. Stage two - finding and saving pictures and sounds. Stage three- laying out pictures in the storyboard frames. Stage four - Slide transitions and effects. Stage Five -Adding Sounds and Text in the Timeline. Stage Six - recording voice-over narrations. Stage seven - making minute adjustments in the timeline. Stage Eight - recording your movie. I don't want to make it too complicated and long, but I also don't want to lose the sense that this is a simple, step by step process to get from beginning to end. I'm afraid that a bunch of videos might seem scattered to kids who just want to see the house built from the basement to the roof.

Well, anyway, almost all of them had something on their storyboard, so that's good.

As far as data collection, I messed up again. Today I just wanted to have a lot of time for storyboard and didn't want to drag the review. Still, in periods 2 (CPS) and 7 (Quizshow Teams) it took way too long. Period 10 was scheduled for QuizShow solo which takes the longest of al b/c the new question banks need to be imported. So I executive decided just to do the grammar, and to do it with CPS alone. My concern was that kids already struggle with adjective/adverb phrases and to add all the time of quizshow solo without any guidance on the answers would be crazy. In fact, in 2nd hour the percent correct on the first couple questions was 29 and 33%, though eventually this moved up to the mid '80's after we discussed the why's and how's. Quizshow teams had similar lousy first questions, but a little discussion seemed to help iron out the problems. So in 10th I just wanted to do enough review problems that I wouldn't have to worry that they were going to bomb the test tomorrow.

Speaking of that test, I haven't made it yet. So I better get back to work. Plus I need to grade their Speak quizzes and studyguides from earlier this week. Mostly, though, I HAVE TO make that tutorial video. And I'm soooo sleeeeeepy...

Where's November Going??

So time is flying and I can't believe I'm mostly on top of things. Last week ended in disaster in terms of storing data because period 7's computers all crashed so I had to pull the score off their machines and enter the score on the first question line. Which means everybody got a 3 billion percent on question 1 and nothing on the rest. Brutal. I'll try to compile the stats later today, but I'm really busy. Here's the gist - I've assigned the projects, made a sample, created storyboards, run the most successful fall blood drive in school history, started Speak, and set up a schedule for the rest of November. We're marching on with vocab, phrases this week in grammar (clauses next week, compound/complex etc after that), Speak chapter 3 is tomorrow along with an end of the week quiz. This week is for storyboarding - next week is for how to create the project and getting started. I'm just really busy. Later today I need to create a Camtasia video for students making the project and a list of resources that students can use to find sound effects, music, and images. Everything has to be done by the end of the month. December and January are for Of Mice and Men and Heroes. Crazy!
So off to camtasia. Also, the library just got a Flip video which I've got to experiment with. I'll attach the video sample of the project. But it takes up a lot of space, so I don't know if I'm allowed to.

End of Week 10

Thursday was a lot easier than I thought it would be. So as I scan in the vocabulary textbook and procrastinate the blood drive, I thought I'd fill me in. On Wednesday I reviewed using the following format - period 2 CPS, period 7 Quizshow Teams, period 10 Quizshow self-study. I also (as I mentioned earlier) added Quia this week. Thursday I was in the building, so I kept the class on track by assigning projects and giving them instructions. I found 2 articles for each of the research topics (underage drinking, date rape, depression, teachers and politics, etc.) that relate to Speak. I .pdf'd the articles and had each student read two and take notes and answer some questions. Next they will organize the most significant information and draw their own conclusions (after the quiz today and over the weekend). At the end of class today I also showed a child abuse video from last year. It's not great, but C work anyway. It was for a different project, but works well here. I can use it to give a general picture of what they're expected to do and point out some errors that they want to avoid.

Anyway, that's all for next week. Today is quiz day, which means a chance to see if the data on the review games tells a story. I'm anxious to see what I get. This week I created separate tests for vocabulary and grammar/notes. That seems silly. I should be able to tease that data apart based on the tagging but I'm becoming more disappointed by Examview's capabilities as a tool for scientific measurement. (oh, btw, I talked my way into an Examview training on November 27 at Central. Perhaps I'll pick up more information on tagging and reporting).

I have a blood drive next Tuesday and I need to enter all the students names and schedules on the excel spreadsheet. I also need to make a model presentation for English I. Finally, I need a reading schedule for Speak that moves quickly but allows time for our project to progress. Walter thinks I'm crazy, trying to do a project, read Speak, read OMAM, and do the Hero Unit while also moving forward with Grammar and vocabulary. He's probably right.

I'll post the data lata!

Second Quarter

Alright, I could post the results of the quarter one experiment here, but they're probably boring to other people. And the first round is fairly inconclusive. I'll tell you what I do have - the final tests of grammar and vocabulary were separate and that was important. The supplemental review technologies seemed to behave differently for these two different skills. I found that independent practice on quizshow seemed to have a much more positive effect on vocabulary but the eInstruction pads seemed more effective for grammar. Interestingly, the kids' top choice - team Quizshow - did not seem to be the most effective way to do anything. My speculation is that recall activities require quiet and focused repetition. Skills that require comprehension of some underlying concept (Identifying and adverb is not memory in a new sentence, but understanding of how adverbs work) may work better when a teacher moderates and discusses what went right and wrong and then applies that concept to a subsequent question. As far as CPS being more effective in round one than Team Quizshow, I don't know if there's a distraction element in quizshow or what. Perhaps it was a peculiarity of the first round.

Round 2 should be easy, but I added a bunch of Quia games online. I know I shouldn't add any new variables while the experiment is still in play, but I don't want to deny the opportunity. I'll work it into the mix in terms of testing effectiveness later. Now it's available to everyone and not pushed by me more in one class more than any other so it's a new constant.

Blah - I'm not very focused today. So my new plan this week is to use Quizshow Teams period 7, CPS period 2, and Quizshow individual period 10. Already I'm messing up the data, though, because yesterday period 7 had extra time and got to do about 14 team quizshow questions. Not only that, but all three classes had various times on quia b/c they finished the new vocab and Parts of the Sentence Pretest (more later) at different times. I'm gonna pretend it doesn't matter because ignorance is bliss. I have a giant problem because I'm out all day Thursday and I can't run a review. IN FACT - Thursday is a big problem in my schedule for lots of reasons. But I'll have to run the review tomorrow and plan something for Thursday...

The grammar this week is fairly easy - sentences/fragments/subjects/predicates/kinds of sentences. I pretested and found the kids knew everything but compound subjects and predicates and didn't know the names of the kinds of sentences. So it should be pretty straightforward to measure growth. I wish I had pretested vocabulary.

Today I threw out some topics for a SPEAK prereading activity. My crazy theory is to have them create moviemaker projects for the issues and social problems that are dealt with in the novel. Well, I have to get back to work. But if I can't remember what I was thinking yesterday tomorrow then this will help.

So it's the end of quarter one...

And what have we learned?
That's a two-headed question with some sharp teeth. I've learned some but not all of what I'm after. My students have also learned some but not all of what I want them to know. Worst of all, I don't know as much about what I want them to learn as I thought I would at this point. Because I didn't figure out how to tag data well until recently (if then) in Examview and because I'm not getting very sophisticated reports from Examview, I can't really say with certainty after 6 weeks which parts of speech are giving students the most trouble and what exact components of those parts of speech need review. I mean, I have good enough data to see that students struggle with verbs, prepositions, pronouns, and adverbs more than nouns, adjectives, conjunctions, and interjections. But are the intensive pronouns harder than demonstrative... Well, I don't know that. Vocabulary, too, was a disappointment. This time because I gave paper tests and scanned them (I GOT MY SCANNER TODAY) but there were three different versions of the test and only one scanned. Unless I want to build the whole tests over (but not random this time) I can't collect the data. Soooo, I don't know positively what words and activities were easiest and hardest.

I need to go back and look at methods used to review for the tests. This time, I used CPS with period 2 for the grammar and vocab tests, Quizshow solo with period 7, and Quizshow Group with period 10. The scores were better for period 2 than the other 2 classes. However, the grades are always better for period 2. So, next time, period 2 gets Quizshow Group, etc. Stay tuned.

I got my scanner. Now what? Besides scanning quizzes when I'm absent (and showing others how to scan them), I want to scan copies of every old handout that I need for class and of every useful page in their books. Forget my.hrw.com if I can .pdf the story!

Well, back to work. Blood drive and grading make-up papers and hand-scoring those tests (grr.). I guess I'll talk to me later.

PS - why oh why did I assign paragraphs at the end of the quarter??? What a dumb move that was. I'm caught up on grading and could just plan my way into next quarter but instead I'm gonna fall behind on grading paragraphs. dumb move (but I've got to make them write at least twice a quarter!).

Why Blog?

If I already have a sharepoint site, is Blogging preferable to using Shared Documents on Sharepoint?

Well, that's the question. So to set up an experiment, I should have students use both services to post documents and collaborate or peer review from there. In each case, I'll try to measure the value of the two methods. I want to see how easy this is for students to access, how well I can monitor their progress, how beneficial and meaningful their collaboration is, how effective my interim contents are, and how convenient and secure file maintenance is. Then I can decide which system to use in my classes. I like the Google because it does not rely on the students' owning programs and seems a little more intuitive than Microsoft Document Workspace. But maybe the workspace is good, too. We shall see soon.

On Friday I will have the students use both programs for the first time. More to come.