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
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