Evaluations

I have been thinking about evaluations a good deal lately. It seems this is on the minds of many public educators with the new evaluation model wreaking havoc. I think I will borrow and idea from Sharon and have my students do an online survey/evaluation at the end of the school year. It might include the following questions:

• What was your favorite unit this year?
• What was your least favorite unit this year?
• What helped you the most to be successful in 6th grade science?
• What are some things Mrs. Price can do to help students understand science concepts.
• What was the best thing we did in science this year?

I really liked my experiences with surveymonkey.com and so I will probably use it for my end of course evaluation.

Reflection on design project

We have effectively finished this project and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on it. It seems like we have worked our butts off putting this together and I really hope we have hit the mark. I’ve enjoyed collaborating with Sharon and Sharee. It was so easy to work with two people I have had a professional relationship and friendship with for several years.

I appreciate all of the new information and resources I have gained from this experience. It had not occurred to me how to make a pitch to a central office personnel in order to gain funding/permission to administer professional developments. I enjoyed playing around with Pinterest and learning about Delicious. I also discovered some neat blogs in my research like http://www.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/what-everybody-ought-to-know-about-instructional-design/.

Resources 11/1-13

I have been told about some new resources that I plan to use in my classroom. Here they are.

A colleague has mentioned a site where standardized assessments from various states have been collected. As assessment is an area where many teachers struggle, I find this particularly helpful to have a bank of tests available. http://edinformatics.com/testing/

My husband recently sent me a link to a site that has online books and other materials called big universe.com. I used it for enrichment in my French class. Understanding learner needs is a crucial part of instructional design (Larson & Lockee, 2012). High achieving students are often left out of planning because the push is to focus on “no child left behind.” Therefore the students that are leading the pack slow down or get bored. My French students are those pack leaders and I wanted to provide them an opportunity for challenge. I found a cute story integrated with French words by Marie Le Tourneau called The Mice of Bistrot des Sept Freres. They used it in a project this week that turned out great. The only pitfall with this is it costs to subscribe.

Larson, M.B., & Lockee, B.B. (2012). Streamlined ID: A practical approach to instructional design. NY: Routledge.

Le Tourneau, Marie. (2008). The Mice of Bistrot des Sept Freres. NY: Tanglewood.

Recent finds (8/12-10/12)

So, I’m very excited to find some new resources mainly for my classroom.

• I am extremely impressed with Weebly (weebly.com) as a site builder. I have created a minimal site with it and like its intuitiveness. I am contemplating making it my class website and referring students/parents to it from my mandatory classjump site. I want to test the ease of uploading files and videos. I am thinking of videoing/recording lessons and loading them for students who are absent.
• I learned from a classmate about an app called Pocket that can load youtube videos and then show at school without internet. I like this b/c there are often videos that are appropriate but not on teacher tube.
• I recently learned from Matt about an animation creator that is cool: xtranormal.com. I used it to create a video, http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/13797591/agathian-dilema, for my EDP spaceship project. The kids loved it and I had a blast making it! I will definitely use this again.

Jennifer’s first steps: or the birth of a blogger

So, here it is…my first blog ever. I am doing this for IT 570 as part of my Master’s degree. I hope to be able to play around with word press more because this seems really fun and useful.

“Still a little dazed and confused.”