Welcome to the last week of Learn and Earn! I have thoroughly enjoyed working with you over the course of the past few months. Each week I continued to be impressed with the insightful and thorough comments you offered in response to the assignment and in response to each other. Your engagement in this effort really exemplifies Tahoma teachers as lifelong learners and risk takers. We hope it has been a worthwhile experience for you.
A couple housekeeping issues:
For those of you taking this class for clock hours, soon I will be sending out the paperwork for you to fill out and return.
This week, for your last “assignment” I'm asking two things:
1. Go back to one or two previous posts and take a look at your classmates’ comments. Choose one or two of these comments to respond to by answering someone’s question, providing your perspective on someone’s idea, offering a suggestion, etc.
2. Provide your feedback about the class using the form below.
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Thursday, January 13, 2011
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Week 9: These Teachers Rock! Literally.
You might have already heard of these fantabulous history teachers through FaceBook--that's where I learned of them (thanks Amy Doyle!). They launched their YouTube channel in early December, so they got a bit of publicity as a result, but it looks like they've been busy making history fun for a while now. Anyway, I couldn't help passing on their fine work to you. I realize that you don't all teach in a content area that would necessarily make use of their videos (re-writing popular song lyrics to explain historical (and literary) events like the French Revolution, Beowulf, The Norman Conquest, etc.). However, I think you can all imagine a situation where you might assign something like this for students and I’d like this week’s post to be about these types of projects in general—whether they involve technology or not.
I can think of many times I've assigned a project that involved hours and hours of work (like cutting, gluing, coloring, making stick figures out of marshmallows, etc.). Sometimes individual projects turned out really cool, many other times they were a disappointment. Grading both the successful and not-so-successful projects was always a bit of a struggle because it often wasn’t until then that I would realize that my rubric didn't truly focus on the learning I was trying to have students demonstrate. In many cases, I ran into the problem of judging the quality of the cutting, gluing, food-morphing, instead of the evidence of learning. Don't get me wrong--producing a high quality product is important, but, as teacher, I had to ask myself, whether the hours of work required to produce a high quality product was really fair, or even worth it. Ideally, I'd want most (if not all) of the time my students were engaged in a project to be time they were practicing or deepening their understanding of the learning. However, without clearly thinking this through at the beginning, we can too easily end up in the situation I describe, comparing David’s marshmallow-man assembly skills with Stephanie’s (or, worse, Stephanie’s mom’s).
With that in mind, this is probably how I'd approach an assignment like this: I would show students a few examples, then we'd craft a rubric together--really focusing on the content/quality of the lyrics and choice of accompanying images/footage. I'd probably only have them create a storyboard of the video with the lyrics and wouldn’t have them go so far as to make an actual video (which would require HOURS of work to produce a high quality product). The process of re-writing the lyrics and planning for the accompanying images/footage is really where the demonstration of the learning is. I would, of course, be sure to clearly communicate this to my students. Discussing how the actual creation of the video could easily turn into busy work would help them better understand what it is they are to learn from the experience. If I gave them the option of going the next step and making a video, I’d make sure the finer points of video recording, editing and production were only a small part of the grade (unless, of course, I had the additional learning goal of producing music videos AND had actually taught them how to do it). How many times have we been faced with grading students on something (e.g. drawing, diorama making, making a game board, etc,) without teaching them how to do so first? Seems a little unfair unless the bulk of the grade reflects the evidence of meeting the learning goal, not the finer points of the product. My guess is that even though making the video wouldn't be required, some students would go ahead and make it anyway.
What do you think? Yep, that's it--that's this week's assignment. What insights, comments, or additions do you want to add? (You can even disagree with me if you want. ;))
I can think of many times I've assigned a project that involved hours and hours of work (like cutting, gluing, coloring, making stick figures out of marshmallows, etc.). Sometimes individual projects turned out really cool, many other times they were a disappointment. Grading both the successful and not-so-successful projects was always a bit of a struggle because it often wasn’t until then that I would realize that my rubric didn't truly focus on the learning I was trying to have students demonstrate. In many cases, I ran into the problem of judging the quality of the cutting, gluing, food-morphing, instead of the evidence of learning. Don't get me wrong--producing a high quality product is important, but, as teacher, I had to ask myself, whether the hours of work required to produce a high quality product was really fair, or even worth it. Ideally, I'd want most (if not all) of the time my students were engaged in a project to be time they were practicing or deepening their understanding of the learning. However, without clearly thinking this through at the beginning, we can too easily end up in the situation I describe, comparing David’s marshmallow-man assembly skills with Stephanie’s (or, worse, Stephanie’s mom’s).
With that in mind, this is probably how I'd approach an assignment like this: I would show students a few examples, then we'd craft a rubric together--really focusing on the content/quality of the lyrics and choice of accompanying images/footage. I'd probably only have them create a storyboard of the video with the lyrics and wouldn’t have them go so far as to make an actual video (which would require HOURS of work to produce a high quality product). The process of re-writing the lyrics and planning for the accompanying images/footage is really where the demonstration of the learning is. I would, of course, be sure to clearly communicate this to my students. Discussing how the actual creation of the video could easily turn into busy work would help them better understand what it is they are to learn from the experience. If I gave them the option of going the next step and making a video, I’d make sure the finer points of video recording, editing and production were only a small part of the grade (unless, of course, I had the additional learning goal of producing music videos AND had actually taught them how to do it). How many times have we been faced with grading students on something (e.g. drawing, diorama making, making a game board, etc,) without teaching them how to do so first? Seems a little unfair unless the bulk of the grade reflects the evidence of meeting the learning goal, not the finer points of the product. My guess is that even though making the video wouldn't be required, some students would go ahead and make it anyway.
What do you think? Yep, that's it--that's this week's assignment. What insights, comments, or additions do you want to add? (You can even disagree with me if you want. ;))
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