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.