I thought I would share a post I just posted for my students in one of my online courses this term. I have two reasons for occasionally posting these in my courses. First, is to help explain how I grade, and what I think is important in the coursework. Second, is to provide a bit of input for how they might make the best of their learning experience to stand out in the crowd.
As we begin our final two weeks of activities in the course, I would like to present a few ideas that are in my mind from our work together so far. Just a few observations, recommendations and challenges for you to consider and do with as you wish.
1. Thoughts about discussion questions.
The main thought in my mind is to just remind everyone of how important it is to ‘read the question’. Take the extra few minutes to re-read the questions, and jot-down a simple list of exactly what the question is asking you to do. This will save you some points, as well as some time. For example, some responses to our last discussion questions were very good, and included lots of good detail, but simply did not answer parts of the questions being asked.
Lets’ take a quick look:
- Research and select technological tools that can be used for summative and
formative assessments (they can be the same technology – but must
measure objectives in both ways) and explain in detail (using outside
resources to support your position) how the technology would meet the
need within your own educational environment.
- Research assessment technologies and find one to review that could be or will be
used in your Final Project; share your review and include the link so
your learning colleagues can benefit from your research.
As I read this, I would make the following list:
1. Select tech tools that can be used for summative and formative assessment.
2. Those tools must measure assessment in both ways.
3. Explain “IN DETAIL” how the tools meet the need IN MY OWN ENVIRONMENT.
4. Include outside resources.
5. Find an assessment tech tool that could or would be used IN MY CLASS PROJECT.
6. Review that tool.
7. Share the link to my review in my response.
That’s what I hear the question asking for. For a 10 out of 10, I need to respond to each part.
Note that the question never asks me to describe or define formative or summative assessment. It is ok to add that if you want, but taking the time to do so is optional, and more importantly, including it in the response doesn’t impact the grade, because it is not being asked for.
Most central to my response, since it is mentioned more than once, is the need to relate what I find to my personal situation and to my class project. Leaving this part out is going to cost me.
The question says nothing about the length of my response, so my goal is to just answer the specific questions. If I can do that in two brief paragraphs, that seems to be as effective as filling 3 pages.
So, to save time and points, read and outline the question, and then just work your way through those key questions.
2. “As it relates to your personal educational environment”
You see this line time and time again in the questions for discussion posts. From my perspective, this is actually the most important and most valuable piece of those questions and is the information I am most interested in seeing in a good response.
For me, this piece is asking you to take whatever you have searched for, reviewed and thought about, and to make the attempt to relate it to your personal, specific, real-world, “what you do during the day”, activities. This is the part that takes the content from being “about” something, and makes it something that has meaning in your world. While that sounds a bit “60′s” and academic-babble, it is actually (In my opinion) focusing on the entire reason you are taking these courses in the first place.
While it takes time to search for tools and think about how they might be used in “education”, “corporate training”, or used in a general sense “instructors might do this…”, stopping here means you are not getting your money’s worth out of your coursework. I’ve worked with people who have heads filled with tons of this “instructors might do this…” kind of information, but who have absolutely no ability to actually “DO” anything with that information. They have never made the actual connection between “instructors”, and “me”. Those people who do make that connection stand out in the crowd!
Here’s the deal. In writing the formal papers and project things, we want and need to avoid focusing on ourselves and our work. But in the informal discussions and blogs responding to the questions, it is how the material relates and connects to you personally, and to your unique work activities that is the gold. Anyone can tell me what “instructors” could do….I want to know what YOU could do in a specific situation in your unique place in the learning world.
The problem is that this is hard. It is much easier to stay at the superficial level and write generalities about what some hypothetical “instructor” might do. But my guess is that your goal is not to earn a hypothetical degree. So, I would encourage you to take that next step and when the question asks how the information “relates to your personal environment”, take a specific activity from your world and figure out how it actually might relate…how might you actually use that tool…what would you actually DO with it…what would your learners actually DO with it…and what do you think the result might be. I can tell you quite honestly that the extra effort will be fully worthwhile.
3. Thoughts about using technology to enhance learning.
One of my personal concerns, and therefore has not been a part of how I’ve graded anything this time, is the limits we educators put upon our personal vision for the potential of technology to enhance learning. When we talk about assessment, we usually limit ourselves to searching for technology that is “designed for” doing some form of assessment. As is normally the case, our first view of integrating technology into learning and training is to find tools we can “bring into” our existing activities, and hope they will do something new.
The result is that we usually end up with tools that just let us continuing doing what we’ve always done, just with a few new gadgets involved. While this is “ok”, it is a long way from exploring the true potential of technology for enhancing learning and training.
Honestly, one of the things I would like to change in this course is the approach of asking students to find technologies that “fit” into the various levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. The appearance is that those technologies are limited in their scope, and their potential is defined. I just don’t accept this approach.
In the last unit we were asked to focus on tools for assessment, and most all examples were tools that were clearly created to continue the traditional approaches to assessment; just with new tools. My preference would be to ask you to take a technology tool that seems to have absolutely no connection to assessment, and come up with a new way to allow your learners to demonstrate their level of mastery of the objectives. This means that it is not going to look or smell like a “traditional” assessment, and based on the research, is more likely to provide more authentic measurement of the learner’s actually level of mastery.
So my challenge to you is to be polite enough to read and review the things you are presented about mind-mapping, quizzing and survey tools, and all of the other pre-defined approaches to using technology. But then invest the brain cells to take the next step and see how you might use technology to create something totally new and unique for your learners; something that might be so much more meaningful for them. From my personal perspective, that step is what is going to give you the edge, and give you the mindset that is going to set you apart and make the changes that need to be made.
Ok, that’s it…I’m done there. We have two more weeks in the course and they look to be busy ones. If you have questions about projects or anything else, please let me know and we’ll see what answers we can come up with.
Thanks for your hard work,