I decided to use the Haiku Learning Management System to present my final. It is extremely easy and I like the look and ease with which I can move components about as I make changes to the organization of the site. In addition, when I wanted to embed my pre-course survey into the site, I discovered that SurveyMonkey’s embed code was not supported by Haiku. Even as a “free” user of the service, I received excellent support service. By the end of the next day, I had received an e-mail telling me that SurveyMonkey’s embed code was now supported and if I needed anything else to please let the service team know.

While I have not quite finished with my final, the URL is:

https://www.myhaikuclass.com/lacvc4/assessmenttoolkit.

Please visit and let me know what you think.

Lori

Unlike the engineers and management of Honda, teachers and students, being in the education business, often see failure as a bad thing. In Memphis, the city schools have a no failure policy for grades K-3 and a one time fail in grades 4-8, the rationale being that failure is damaging to the self-esteem of our youngest students and leads to dropping out in the upper grades.  What does this teach our children? Failure is bad.  We are going to protect you from failure.  We don’t want you to fail.

Perhaps we should look at this from a different perspective.  Is failure fun?  No.  Do I ever like failing?  No.  Is it possible to succeed at everything the first time?  No.  Do I learn from my failures?  Always.

I think that we have forgotten that children are very resilient.  If taught that failure happens to us all and that it is a learning experience, they will be able to come back even stronger.  Thomas Edison, one of the greatest inventors of all time, said of his efforts to invent a working light bulb, “If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”

We must stop looking at failure as something that is bad.  It isn’t pleasant, and we should do our very best to avoid it, but failure is an opportunity — an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to try again, an opportunity to succeed the next time.

My pre-course survey is designed to give me information about my student’s current reading habits, attitudes, and abilities.  I am a firm believer that the only way to become a better reader is to read, but comprehension may be facilitated through reflection and collaboration. Reading is unique in that it is both highly personal, but can be extremely social as evidenced by the popularity of book clubs and social reading sites such as Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari, etc.

In order for a literature circle to work to its fullest potential, everyone must read the text individually.  Therefore, several of my survey questions focus upon the individual student’s reading habits and attitudes towards reading.  I need to know who my passionate readers are as well as those who are more reluctant or hostile to reading.  Other questions focus upon the books that students enjoy reading and the ones that they hated or could not even finish.  This will give me additional information on the types of literature the students like to read.  In this way, I will be able to give students a voice in the literature selected for the current class when I create the literature sets for the different literature circles.

I used my favorite survey creation tool SurveyMonkey to create a pre-course survey for my Collaborative Comprehesion Course: Click here to take survey .

Whether an instructor utilizes the original version of Bloom’s Taxonomy or the action oriented revision, it is most important that an instructor of any course, be it traditional, blended, or online, consider the different levels of thinking outlined by Bloom when designing the course.

Grant Wiggins has gone so far as to say that instructors should begin designing their course with the assessment.  His Understanding by Design Framework (utilizing a Backward Design process) asks what is it that you want students to be able to know or do when they finish the course of study.  According to Wiggins, “Students reveal their understanding most effectively when they are provided with complex, authentic opportunities to explain, interpret, apply, shift perspective, empathize, and self-assess.”  In other words, the best courses allow students the opportunities to show what they know utilizing the higher cognitive processes described by Bloom.

My proposed course, an online literary analysis class, will require many higher cognitive processes.  The very act of comprehending written text requires active thinking, and many layers of complexity are added to that process when students are asked to analyze and evaluate any given text.  The synthesis of a reader’s background knowledge, analysis and connections created between a text and the reader is an essential skill if a reader is to make any book his own.  I have outlined some of these processes and the prerequisite skills in this Assessment Table.

At the Martin Institute Spring Conference last week, I attended a session on  PLNs for Educators led by my mentors and friends Cathy Kyle, Melissa Smith, Cindy Brock and Kelli Anderson.  During that session, Melissa mentioned a tool called TweetDeck which she utilized to keep up with her PLN on Twitter.  Thanks to Melissa, I am now a convert to the Twitterverse.  To quote Cindy Brock, “I get it! I get it!”

If you want to know more, Josh Stumpenhorst (@stumpteacher on Twitter) created this fantastic tutorial explaining the basics of how to utilize Twitter and TweetDeck.

As a beginning blogger, I have been generally pleased with WordPress so far, although I have found it a bit difficult to embed some content that I wanted to include on my blog — a Voki and a cool revolving globe version of a clustermap.  At this point, I still haven’t been able to embed those items and from my research it seems that this may not even be possible on a WordPress hosted blog. However, my friend’s who blog on Blogger are able to utilize those widgets. Did I choose the best blogging platform for me?

This situation started me thinking about alternative blogging sites for my classes.  I like Kidblog and it seems to be working well, but what else is out there.  Would Edublogs have been a better choice?  Wes Fryer has been exploring this same thought with his Technology for Teachers class this fall, and he posted a great blog entry Comparing Kidblog and Edublogs.  In the post, he also included screencasts on how to embed video in each application which may be helpful to my teachers as they begin to look into blogging with their students.  From his post and the videos, I feel I made the right choice for my school at this time, but as my school, teachers, and students become more familiar with the technology and the applications available, I will keep alternatives in mind.

Another type of social networking tool was reviewed by one of my partners. She describes LiveJournal as a combination of a blog and Facebook. Her review emphasizes the use of LiveJournal as a reflective tool with social feedback.

The third tool reviewed for our Assessment Toolbox Assignment, Survey Monkey, is an easy to use and cost effective online survey application. For further information, the full review may be read on the Web 2.0 Assessment Toolbox.

One advantage of putting our toolbox in a Wiki format, is the ability to easily modify, edit and add to our toolbox as we discover new applications with educational uses.

One of our assignments this week was to write some measurable objectives for a current or potential online course and map the relationship between objectives, activities and relationships.  Learning, activities and assessments are all intertwined in a great learning environment with some assessment happening within the activities so that the instructor can modify instruction as needed.  Assessment should never be an add on activity at the end of a unit, but an essential part of the instruction.  The learning process is seldom linear which makes concept mapping a great method of outlining a potential unit or course.

With this in mind, I created this concept map using Inspiration to detail the learning process I envision for teaching students literary analysis within literature circles.

Discovery School Clipart

Whew!  This has been an overwhelming week in the class, at least for me.  I felt a bit all over the place between the objectives, readings, and activities.  I just could not seem to make them all connect coherently in my brain.   The readings, however, were interesting and thought provoking.

Written six years ago, Dr. Curtis Bonk’s Article describing thirty emerging technologies  was an interesting read.  It was great fun to see how correct he was in his predictions.  Our discussion this week centered around this article and was quite lively.  I focused my initial post on the use of digital portfolios which lead to a discussion of what makes a good portfolio.   Are all portfolios equal?  What role does purpose play in the creation of a portfolio?  I came to the conclusion that purpose must guide the creation of any portfolio.  For assessment portfolios, I believe an instructor is responsible for giving students the information they need to guide them in selecting the artifacts to include in the portfolio and how much reflection is required.

So many great resources and ideas were presented expanding on the article.  It was also interesting to compare Dr. Bonk’s article to the 2010 Horizon Report.   Some of Dr. Bonk’s ideas are repeated in the Horizon Report as they are just now finding an audience.  Of particular interest to educators, the rise of mobile technologies and e-books will have to change the way we look at where and how learning and reading occur.  Books have been around for thousands of years, virtually unchanged in format.   Just this last week,  Amazon announced that e-book sales had surpassed paperback sales in their store.  It’s a Brave New World.