This week turned out to be equally eventful if not more. There were two significant digital discoveries. Rubrics and WebQuests. WebQuests can dvelop students' critical thinking skills if they help the teacher to evolve them and also if they keep referring to them as they progress in their projects. These tools will make learners surf the net resources purposefully. I managed my way well with Rubrics through Rubistar.com. Rubrics meant something else earlier. They were instructions written in great detail in tests for students. It is all about scoring guidelines, as discussed in the article from NCLRC, and it can be interactive. It is defined as an "an interactive assessment tool". It serves as a checklist, in a way of guidelienes, covering all aspects of activities/projects and has a vertical scale too. Learners can participate in its development. Such an attitude to its preparation can produce great results. Project-based learning becomes an Alternative Assessment as it is very different from traditional teaching and testing which used to benefit fewer learners. It is closely connected with the real world and projects have a fabulous application value. Since such projects are of such value to people around, feedback can come from different quarters which can be very useful as learning inputs for learners. The article by Susan Gaer captures the issues discussed earlier and elaborates on the importance of meaning value in her article. She elaborates on the issue with illustrations of projects which are closely linked with life and therefore carries relevance. If students can develop the feeling of ownership for the projects, the learning will be more effective.
I can use all these tools in my teacher education programs with no difficulty. The Govt. of India is very keen that teachers use such tools to develop materials for websites for easy access for learners. The Project outline for us is evolving well; I plan to take up prosodic features with the help of interviews from various weblinks. Since I will actually develop the project through workshops for my trainees, a lot of learning should take place in class.
I particularly enjoyed the class interaction on feedback on students' strengths and weaknesses and also on technology supported project outlines of other class members. I learnt a lot from them.
I had a very busy week at work as well but now I am satisfied with my involvement and contribution to my course. I managed to find my 20 hours.
As always, Robert has been supportive of the difficulties I face. I do face difficulties with new technology. Nicenet is perfect but half the blogs I try sending don't go for some reason. I succeeded only in my second attempt of rubrics on Rubistar. I need to go back to WebQuest now. I just have to crack it.
Best of Luck to me.
Sharda
Hi Sharda,
ReplyDeleteI agree that teachers should praise students work positively mostly, but it is sometimes necessary to tell students how their performance and works really are, I do it once in the semester or twice at most twice, no more, I try to put it in the nicest way at the beginning ending up being straightforward and telling what they are doing in class, what is expected from them and looking back on the dos and don’ts were are told at the beginning of the course and what the weaknesses to improve are, but once again we need to be very careful not to hurt any students, you know, some are very sensitive, this is just make them realize that apart from their good works, we also keep track of their mistakes and our praise cannot always be positive. On the other hand, if we just tell them “Well done!”, “excellent!”, “ Way to go!” and so on, all will think they never make mistakes and those that do, will keep on making them and they might become developmental after sometime.
Javier
Hi Sharda
ReplyDeleteIt looks like you were very busy...and very productive this past week. It is great to know you have support in your country and your context for "getting the word out" on existing tools.
Robert