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.