Multimedia Madness - Workshop 6

Multimedia presentations are excellent options for student assessment partially because they allow for such creativity. In a recent Powerpoint assignment I gave my students, they were required to include some sort of visual to show how they analyzed their assigned poem. I loved watching which kind of visual they selected, and then noting how they structured the presentations. One student designed the slides using the Powerpoint templates and played with the power of color symbolism. Another student flashed pictures in between certain lines of the poem so the meaning might be portrayed more powerfully. Through the use of this technology, student’s individual identities were highlighted. They had an element of choice and an artistic quality to their presentation. I love giving them this freedom because so many times they teach me how to interpret and how to feel lines of old text still at work today.
As Turkle (2004) suggests, how can teachers use technology to develop a spirit of “democracy, tolerance, diversity, and complexity of opinion”? I think that the first step is in giving students choice. They are not mere programs to memorize and regurgitate. They are creative beings designed to craft and invent and conceive. What great way to allow them to use these God-given abilities!
The greatest challenge comes then when these acts of creation are a bit strange, or they are unclear, or messy. When choices are given students may make the wrong choice, or at least an undesirable one. Other students may not know how to handle the outlier personality in the room with a bizarre presentation. With diversity and complexity in student production comes equally dense and compound issues in student interaction, in self-esteem questions etc. It is challenging to know how to encourage students to experiment, to try, but also to extend grace to each other in the process.

Workshop 5 Essential Questions

I first started considering essential questions this year when trying to realign my coursework with standards and benchmarks. I found that using the UBD essential question format was very helpful in the development of student critical thinking. I also can put these questions on student rubrics, and in self-assessment activities, so I can easily link our work in class on a day to day basis with the bigger picture. The Questioning Toolkit looks like a combination of these essential questions and the classic clustering diagram for teaching writing invention strategies. Most of the questions I use target larger problems or controversies in society. For example, in one class we are considering what it takes to be a good citizen? We will consider a number of different sources, plan seminars, and do research based off of this question. I think that problem-based essential questions are perfect for challenging critical thinking because students have to be involved in creation - they can't just spit back their teacher's words. By using questions, the teacher can prompt and scaffold for a good answer without giving one to directly memorize. I also think this kind of questioning is much more true to life than asking students to memorize facts. They may do well on a game show, but students need to be prepared for a future of using and applying facts, not just knowing them.

Though I might use a few of the groups of questions presented in the Questioning Toolkit as essential questions, but under the site's classification, probing questions and telling questions seem to be the most useful for technology in English. Probing questions could fit into research based technology, and telling questions can fit with multimedia, RSS feeds, and video. These questions can be helpful in showing students how to break a large project into steps.

Workshop #4: Midpoint Thoughts

I continue to be surprised by the elements that I didn’t learn in my undergraduate education. I don’t fault my university or professors in all cases; technology continues to spin and to develop, and every year should bring new insights under the ideal of the ‘lifelong learner’. Still, I wonder how I managed to avoid learning virtually anything about Excel. In this case, trusting a grading program to calculate standard deviation is comparable to students relying on calculator functions over mental math. The quicker way is preferred. More truly, rarely do I consider the mean, median, and mode unless I’m reflecting back to college stats class. There is a time and place for data analysis, even if my preference is to stay in my bubble of language. Our school will be visited next year for our bi-annual review. The committee will want to see data analysis, and currently I am choosing this area as one for procrastination. We also still have yet to assess the date from our fall all-school testing. We need to make it happen. But this number crunching area is not my strong suit.

The Excel reminder is one for me to realize my role as a manager in the school, not that I have to review the data myself, but I need to make sure it happens. Other tools that I can more readily use for development are in the areas of blogging, videoing, and website creation. The learning network is so important within the international school because of the many roles individuals play both in and out of their expertise. Often a question may arise and no one at the school can answer it effectively. So, we need to rely on the experience of other schools in similar places and/or situations. A globally reaching schools needs the global tools to make it effective.