In terms of software/webapps, I have all the Microsoft standards and use Microsoft Sharepoint (a District standard) for sharing information and course content with students and parents. To the limited degree that I use it, the Sharepoint site Discussion board serves as our social networking. I use Examview 6.0 for in-class testing and to create activities for the remote pads (which are delivered via CPS and Quizshow). Online, Academic Reading students use PLATO for targeted instruction. There are also numerous review games posted on Quia.com for kids to use. The whole lab is snugly blanketed in GenevaLogic's Vision software for lab monitoring - an awesome tool for keeping students on task and for speeding up the delivery of content on the computer. The district also employs Deepfreeze for the protection of our computers.
Oh, and our textbook, HRW's Elements of Literature, is online at my.hrw.com. Our vocab book, (Sadlier-Oxford's Vocabulary Workshop Level D) has limited activities online. We have no grammar book per-se at the freshman level, but I try to follow along with the early chapters of what is now HRW's Holt Handbook and used to be Warriner's. And for sure we have novels of all kinds. We've also got a ton of audiobooks both within English and in the Library. Well, not a ton, but a growing collection.
As for human resources, I try not to name names or anything in here. My partner in teaching an and learning works in the same class environment as me and we often work together and sometimes go separate directions when developing materials and activities. Like a character in a Russian novel, I'll call him D-. In tech support, I'm lucky to have the ongoing assistance of someone who has been willing to come early, stay late, work weekends, and image and re-image machines while we troubleshoot problems. I'll use the name Kelty because we've talked camping a bit (I'm an avid camper and could digress for hours on where the family has been and would like to go). I have a tech release period along with another tech-type guy (though he knows a lot more than I do) and he'll probably come up so I'll refer to him as Oak. The only two people ever likely to read this (a department chair and assistant principal) are both good resources but I won't mention them often because it would be weird to evaluate someone who is writing about you. (unless they score cool resources for me, in which case I'll give them mad props - Thanks for the Listening Library CD's WoW.).
At any rate, if I wanted to state my purpose for exploring technology as a means of improving student learning it might take a little time. Essentially, I'm looking to increase engagement, target learning, and improve reporting. That said, the process should be recursive so that better reporting enhances my ability to target assignments, and assignments that give a student the right challenge at the right time are more engaging than those that are too easy or unaccessible. To this end, I have had to learn a little more (last year) about numbers. At first, it was a struggle figuring out how to get numbers that provide more and more specific data about how well students are doing in reaching specific learning goals. Once I finally got numbers to do that, I had to try to figure out what (if any) meaning could reliably be derived from such statistics. After a year of this self-guided study, I know a bit more about what kids know and can do prior to a lesson and afterwards. I also can monitor some of the interventions that they have taken in order to prepare for assessments and can judge the efficacy of some of these interventions.
If those last couple sentences sound a bit loose, you're spot on. The whole point of the blog (and the work that I do behind it) is to examine what I do know about student learning, question the degree to which I really know it, and deliberate whether there's any substantial benefit to students from such knowledge. Sometimes I learn silly things, as with last year's exposee on the difference between my perceptions of how well a class did vs. their actual performance. I kept rating my period 10 lessons as less effective, but the remote control data collected showed the students (an energetic bunch at the end of the day) were learning just as much as my more docile students in period 2. They looked and acted less scholarly, to be sure. But they learned just as well.
Perhaps an example would help - I can take the site usage statistics from Sharepoint and see who has visited the site more often and compare that against the performance in the class to seek a correlation. Last year, I did that at semester's end and found a positive correlation. BUT, what do I really know? Since kids who are more likely to go to a class website are probably the kids who are more likely to do homework, study, etc, it seems almost inevitable there would be a correlation (meaning it's possible that all my sharepoint stuff is a waste of time... or not). But this year, I've pretested all the kids. Soooo, I should be able to measure improvement vs. Sharepoint participation which seems like it could tell me a more valid story about the effectiveness of using a Sharepoint site bolstered with numerous supplemental learning activities. Furthermore, week to week site usage statistics can look for correlations between the ups and downs of those students who perform with dramatic inconsistencies. Are trips to the Sharepoint in line with those ups and downs? I can look.
The details of doing such an experiment are enjoyable to about a half dozen nerds in the world. But in the end, I pull data from Sharepoint into excel and drag test results from Examview into excel and the rest is history. In fact, I've got a ton of review stuff up now and I know some will ignore it and some will use it, so tomorrow I'll run a correlation and post it back here. For now, I've got stuff to do....
1 comment:
if you need a more advanced SharePoint usage reports - use CardioLog by intlock, the basic reports are for free... it would give you some more insights about what's going on with your students.
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