bye and happy holidays.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
A very busy slacker!
Well, that about sums it up. I don't have much time to post and I haven't posted much lately, but I'm pretty busy. Here's the basics: I haven't updated the Excel spreadsheet all week (what did I do with all that free time they give me third hour!!!!). And I didn't create a CPS how-to video yet (though dr. g. asked for one explicitly). But I did.... Make a 6-part podcasting video from the presentation that Lisa and I gave (though I can only host it on the south/staff sharepoint site right now b/c theater projects don't sit well in other places and my public_html folder can't handle fla and swv files. And I spent a bunch of time working on issues with TAC, though I don't know if any of that work will count for much! Oh well. Glad I'm not in admin. Too many meetings and too much consultation. I think I did some other stuff, too, but I don't have time to go into it. Of course, I have my own students, too, and my own pet projects to work on. I think I'll have more time over the break. As soon as I can link to the podcast tutorials I'll post it here. I could post each one separately, but not the theater project. Starting to not like the theater project!!
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Post-Induction Breather
So yesterday I presented for year four teachers on Podcasting and CPS Clickers. I took the day and watched the other presentations as well. Picked up some tips and tricks for word, excel, camtasia/Jing, ClassServer, and voice recognition. Of course, I'm never in a quiet room, so voice recognition is tough, and I have some questions about how class server fits (or is even necessary) in a scorm compliant Sharepoint SLK environment.
It was a lot of fun, and draining, too. I really enjoyed working with LB on Podcasting, but honestly she uses it for so many more applications than I do that I felt guilty even putting my name on the header. I podcast to students and parents about assignments and course announcements. She has students create podcasts for all kinds of sorts of reasons with clear assessment rubrics and strong ties to the curriculum. It inspired me to rethink how I'm going to get kids working on Audacity to create digital story telling lessons. Working with LB was cool and we promised to do it again. She knows the conference circuit better than I do, so I hope she finds a venue. That's two new self-assigned directives. Geez, no wonder it took two weeks to get the Xmas lights up.
Sat in the back with a couple parents from a district parent technology committee and PB an Assistant Prnicipal over at Central (with whom I had worked a long time ago and who I respect a lot). I think it was a good opportunity for people with focused expertise to share perspective informally (meaning we chatted between sessions and sometimes when we shouldn't have). I'll tell me (you) what I was hoping to convey and also what I understood to be everybody's point of view. First, teachers are excited about, experimental with, and determined to use educational technologies. But there are a lot of very real obstacles that make the effective implementation of technologies and the integration of (what should be) complementary technologies difficult. Many of the delays in teachers implementing technology result from factors other than teacher-resistance. From the parents, I got the sense that there's a lot of positive support for teacher implementation of technology and a desire to ses more evidence of the 21'st century portable, reactive, and personalized technologies that would benefit the students. From PB, I got the characteristic enthusiasm for teachers who experiment with technology, as well as the sense that there are important and unexplored connections between technology applications and other initiatives at the school or district level. It certainly got me thinking when she showed me some of the work on student self-monitoring of growth. Since I've got "decent" standards tracking in place already, it wouldn't be hard to share data sets like that with the students so they can track their own progress in visual and graphic ways.
In a reflective mode, I thought that the presentation on clickers went well. My remote mouse broke :( so I was tied to the machine more than I wanted to be. I was really nervous and there were just over 32 people, so not everybody got a remote :( We got it all done on time, though, and I think teachers both had fun and saw the value in the clicker technology. One of the big questions that came up was about other brands of remotes (I think there are three or four brands floating between the schools). I don't think these will be particularly easy to service or support unless we can agree on a standard. I propose (of course) that future purchases use CPS either IR or RF depending upon proven need. But, hey, maybe they'll choose something else. In any case, there should be a standard. I also think there's going to be increased demand for the product, so I should be ready to lend a hand (and Dr. G better be ready to have cash on hand or to break some hearts!)
Geez, what am I doing? I need to grade lots of stuff that came in yesterday. And I didn't even mention a bunch of stuff that I wanted to get in. Next time. Oh, wait. Examview is going to give me access to something called REAP (a data export tool) so I'll keep you informed on that front. OK, busy. Bye.
It was a lot of fun, and draining, too. I really enjoyed working with LB on Podcasting, but honestly she uses it for so many more applications than I do that I felt guilty even putting my name on the header. I podcast to students and parents about assignments and course announcements. She has students create podcasts for all kinds of sorts of reasons with clear assessment rubrics and strong ties to the curriculum. It inspired me to rethink how I'm going to get kids working on Audacity to create digital story telling lessons. Working with LB was cool and we promised to do it again. She knows the conference circuit better than I do, so I hope she finds a venue. That's two new self-assigned directives. Geez, no wonder it took two weeks to get the Xmas lights up.
Sat in the back with a couple parents from a district parent technology committee and PB an Assistant Prnicipal over at Central (with whom I had worked a long time ago and who I respect a lot). I think it was a good opportunity for people with focused expertise to share perspective informally (meaning we chatted between sessions and sometimes when we shouldn't have). I'll tell me (you) what I was hoping to convey and also what I understood to be everybody's point of view. First, teachers are excited about, experimental with, and determined to use educational technologies. But there are a lot of very real obstacles that make the effective implementation of technologies and the integration of (what should be) complementary technologies difficult. Many of the delays in teachers implementing technology result from factors other than teacher-resistance. From the parents, I got the sense that there's a lot of positive support for teacher implementation of technology and a desire to ses more evidence of the 21'st century portable, reactive, and personalized technologies that would benefit the students. From PB, I got the characteristic enthusiasm for teachers who experiment with technology, as well as the sense that there are important and unexplored connections between technology applications and other initiatives at the school or district level. It certainly got me thinking when she showed me some of the work on student self-monitoring of growth. Since I've got "decent" standards tracking in place already, it wouldn't be hard to share data sets like that with the students so they can track their own progress in visual and graphic ways.
In a reflective mode, I thought that the presentation on clickers went well. My remote mouse broke :( so I was tied to the machine more than I wanted to be. I was really nervous and there were just over 32 people, so not everybody got a remote :( We got it all done on time, though, and I think teachers both had fun and saw the value in the clicker technology. One of the big questions that came up was about other brands of remotes (I think there are three or four brands floating between the schools). I don't think these will be particularly easy to service or support unless we can agree on a standard. I propose (of course) that future purchases use CPS either IR or RF depending upon proven need. But, hey, maybe they'll choose something else. In any case, there should be a standard. I also think there's going to be increased demand for the product, so I should be ready to lend a hand (and Dr. G better be ready to have cash on hand or to break some hearts!)
Geez, what am I doing? I need to grade lots of stuff that came in yesterday. And I didn't even mention a bunch of stuff that I wanted to get in. Next time. Oh, wait. Examview is going to give me access to something called REAP (a data export tool) so I'll keep you informed on that front. OK, busy. Bye.
Friday, December 5, 2008
A humbling week..
Not that every week (day) isn't somewhat humbling, but this week has been especially so. Working with my podcasting partner at Central (who is so on her game and hip with all the new apps) to my visits to a bunch of different sites nominated for the "eddie" awards, to watching some of the great Camtasia videos produced for training by JL, it's been a week of watching others who are much more adept at integrating technology. It was fun, mind you. I said humbling, not depressing. But still, it seems a guy could search forever to find the best tools to promote learning and then they'd just invent a dozen new apps (or a web 4.0) and he'd have to start all over.
So I spent my week working on the Camtasia/PPT and CPS/PPT (making it a CPS/PPT/Camtasia) project. I basically took a powerpoint lesson on sentence structure and camtasia'd the animations and voice-overs which resulted in a few short movies on the subject. In camtasia, I cleaned up a couple problems and added highlighting in a few places to emphasize points. Then, in CPS, I launched the ppt with the question bar on the bottom. After each short video, I had them respond to questions, and then we moved on to the next section of the video, etc, etc. I used a lot of visual humor to try to make some of the points, and also hoped that the rolling motion of a video presentation would hold attention and feel stimulating and familiar to the kids. I wanted the stop/question session to be kind of sudden and shocking - like if a tv show or movie suddently stopped and addressed the audience. I'm not sure that the video segment was narrative enough for that. I mean, it did definitely hold their attention better than I do when I present the rules of sentence structure with notes or orally. But, I don't know...
And, the data goon inside of me says - "You don't know because you didn't set up any reliable measurement device. In typical technowonk style, you ran ahead and tried something but didn't think in advance about how to measure it. i.e. pre-event measurements of student engagement with the introduction to materials, score-based measurement on the pre-post lesson learning, narrative feedback on student enjoyment/engagement..." Oh well. Live and learn. Gotta go.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Good Day for eInstruction Outreach
So today we had a demo from Nicole Fryeson at eInstruction and I thought it went well. We chatted up some of the Examview/CPS integration questions that I hadn't gotten satisfactory answers about and then she asked me to forward those and she'll see who she can get to reply from the development team. Here are the questions:
1. While it is possible to export Examview questions to CPS and CPS sessions to examview, a lot of important data get lost. Specifically, from Examview to CPS only the Keyword and State Standards are kept, so the reports that can be run are limited. When the sessions are sent from CPS to Examview, even that data are lost. If a teacher wants to track student and class performance on, say, specific learning objectives or local standards, he can’t. That matters more than you think, because in schools now the focus is all on RtI (response to intervention). So if a class or student is struggling with an objective, we need to be able to measure the success of specific interventions (like an engaging CPS session). How much priority is the cross-program maintenance of those data tags getting as you all continue to develop and integrate the two products?
2. Our district has had two high-level meetings recently to establish a standard testing software. Examview has been one among several candidates. In my opinion, in most ways it is the strongest. However, we’re replacing ParScore, and one complaint that has come up with Examview is the lack of any strong “statistics engine”. By this, the administrators were contrasting ParScore’s ability to measure the reliability coefficient of specific questions, etc. The second problem with Examview came in contrast to Amesweb (sp?). Specifically, the administrators were looking for a way to track waypoint progress for specific objectives. While Examview does allow a teacher to measure specific learning objectives for a given assignment OR across a range of dates (as an average of performance across that range), it does not plot performance on those objectives for specific assignments across a range of dates. While this can be done manually in a program like Excel, the administrators were looking for something that looked like a chart/graph that showed dates and performance levels along the way. Had you been at that meeting, I assure you that you would have seen the enthusiasm for the graphs on AmesWeb among the administrators. With RtI (again) being the big issue, we need an obvious and clear way to measure the effectiveness of interventions throughout the unit (not just at the beginning and end of the unit).
3. Finally, we’ve all been impressed by the flexibility of the algorithm-based questions, especially as they relate to math. However, teachers using vocabulary (foreign language, language arts, biology) would like something similar – a word bank that creates random questions from a collection of words and their definitions. As it stands, right now we use a lot of multiple choice and matching, and students get used to the same wrong answer set being attached to vocabulary words. Is this something in the works?
Of course, I also asked for freebies on a desktop launcher program, but we'll see. Bad news, looks like eventually they'll stop supporting quizshow. Darn.
Very excited about project with a teacher at Central. Odd b/c I only podcast a little, and that's the meat of the presentation. but what I like is that we're using google apps to try to pull it all together and I'm enjoying using the shared docs. Also google-apping the spreadsheet that records tech work. Anyway, I gotta go, but I just finished the camtasia/power-point/CPS practice for clauses, conjunctions, and sentence variety. I can't wait to see how it works. Seems like it has potential for stop motion interactive teaching with AV enhancements (which has been a weakness of mine historically).
Later
1. While it is possible to export Examview questions to CPS and CPS sessions to examview, a lot of important data get lost. Specifically, from Examview to CPS only the Keyword and State Standards are kept, so the reports that can be run are limited. When the sessions are sent from CPS to Examview, even that data are lost. If a teacher wants to track student and class performance on, say, specific learning objectives or local standards, he can’t. That matters more than you think, because in schools now the focus is all on RtI (response to intervention). So if a class or student is struggling with an objective, we need to be able to measure the success of specific interventions (like an engaging CPS session). How much priority is the cross-program maintenance of those data tags getting as you all continue to develop and integrate the two products?
2. Our district has had two high-level meetings recently to establish a standard testing software. Examview has been one among several candidates. In my opinion, in most ways it is the strongest. However, we’re replacing ParScore, and one complaint that has come up with Examview is the lack of any strong “statistics engine”. By this, the administrators were contrasting ParScore’s ability to measure the reliability coefficient of specific questions, etc. The second problem with Examview came in contrast to Amesweb (sp?). Specifically, the administrators were looking for a way to track waypoint progress for specific objectives. While Examview does allow a teacher to measure specific learning objectives for a given assignment OR across a range of dates (as an average of performance across that range), it does not plot performance on those objectives for specific assignments across a range of dates. While this can be done manually in a program like Excel, the administrators were looking for something that looked like a chart/graph that showed dates and performance levels along the way. Had you been at that meeting, I assure you that you would have seen the enthusiasm for the graphs on AmesWeb among the administrators. With RtI (again) being the big issue, we need an obvious and clear way to measure the effectiveness of interventions throughout the unit (not just at the beginning and end of the unit).
3. Finally, we’ve all been impressed by the flexibility of the algorithm-based questions, especially as they relate to math. However, teachers using vocabulary (foreign language, language arts, biology) would like something similar – a word bank that creates random questions from a collection of words and their definitions. As it stands, right now we use a lot of multiple choice and matching, and students get used to the same wrong answer set being attached to vocabulary words. Is this something in the works?
Of course, I also asked for freebies on a desktop launcher program, but we'll see. Bad news, looks like eventually they'll stop supporting quizshow. Darn.
Very excited about project with a teacher at Central. Odd b/c I only podcast a little, and that's the meat of the presentation. but what I like is that we're using google apps to try to pull it all together and I'm enjoying using the shared docs. Also google-apping the spreadsheet that records tech work. Anyway, I gotta go, but I just finished the camtasia/power-point/CPS practice for clauses, conjunctions, and sentence variety. I can't wait to see how it works. Seems like it has potential for stop motion interactive teaching with AV enhancements (which has been a weakness of mine historically).
Later
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