Wiki Essay: Week 3, Assessment in E-Learning

My AP European History students worked on their collaborative essays on the course wiki this week.  Essays were due on Friday. I have been pleased with the process thus far, but do have some things to iron out.

Positives:

I offered students feedback on Thursday night in the comment box.  Most groups had some significant work done by then, and I later read students about incorporating the feedback into the final product.  My suggestions were one sentence long.  I think this made the essays truly formative assessments, because participating students were able to act on my assessment.  I do this with in-class essays, too, by reading student work at their request during essay tests, but this allowed me to see everyone's work.

I also liked that the students were able to see how other students pre-wrote.  In most groups one or more students did some pre-writing by organizing details or analysis into labeled lists before actual writing began.  In the other groups one student put out a thesis first and then essay emerged from that.  Slowing down the essay writing process allowed students to see or practice a pre-writing technique.

Issues:

Several students either did not participate in the essay construction or only participated once.  This issue would probably be greater outside of the AP pool of students.  Other participating students did see the essay as an assignment more than a process and left work late to complete, minimizing the amount of time for feedback.

The other issue was student over use of outside resources.  The essays prompts require analysis supported by specific historical examples.  All prompts were taken from previous AP tests. Here is a sample topic, the choice of one student group:  European women’s lives changed in the course of the nineteenth century politically, economically, and socially.  Identify and explain the reasons for these changes.  The analytic task is for students to identify the overall factors that were promoting changes in women's lives, for example industrialization and the growth of the middle-class.  Outside sources should allow students to then provide more specific examples as evidence.  In practice many student groups loaded up on examples, often to the detriment of analytic categories, while others actually lacked examples, in part because they were replicated analysis from the book.

Adjustment for next time:
 
I think that one adjustment will address several of the issues: breaking the assignment into chunks.  If I were to award class points for participating in the pre-writing this would deepen this benefit, allow me to offer in-course corrections twice, and help me to identify and pressure students who are not participating.  I will definitely do this again with this modification.

Causes of the French Level Concept Map

Unit topic: learning target: assessment activity: activity components

Introducing a classmate: Week 1

To start our Assessment in E-Learning class students paired off for mutual interviews.  We then introduced our partner to the class.  This was pleasant and allowed us to get to know one classmate before learning about the whole class.  It also felt more natural.  In a f2f class I would probably learn people's names, but get to know them more one at a time.  My partner was Dawn Shelbourn, and this is how I introduced her on January 11.  Unfortunately our Packers did not come through for us on the following Sunday.

Please join me in welcoming Dawn Sherbourn to our class.  Dawn has been an educator for 22 years, first with in Adult Basic Education at Black Hawk Technical College in Janesville, WI and now as a 4th grade teacher in Whitewater, WI.  This is her second course in Stout's E-Learning program. 

Dawn sees the program as a way to develop online curriculum  to make her 4th grade class "more authentic, where students are constructing knowledge through projects and discussions."  Like Michelle in Rhinelander Dawn's classroom involves a lot of technology, including laptops and a Promethean board.  The students have taken to the technology, and she has already engaged them in several online, book club discussions.

Like many of us Dawn also has has an eye on the flexible schedule that full time teaching online could afford her in the future.  Dawn and her husband have three wonderful children, two in high school and one in college.  As her family changes increased flexibility would facilitate travel to stay in touch with the children and to take nice weekend trips.

 

Last, but not least, Dawn and her family will be cheering on the Packers this weekend.  Go Pack Go!

Eric in St. Paul, but formerly of Neenah, WI

Assessment Inventory

I found the assessment inventory from Wisc-Online well conceived. Most of the content was familiar to me.  As a classroom teacher for 20+ years I have been in a lot of formal and informal discussions about assessment strategies.  This inventory strikes me as having a useful level of repetition of concepts and examples.  Manipulating the same set of examples a few times over short time period help to solidify the definitions of teacher- and student-centered assessment.

Despite my firm belief in and appreciation for student-centered assessment, I still find myself doing less of it than I would like.  The forces of tradition, habit, and external curricular and testing expectations all weigh against it. But, these are ultimately not sufficient excuses for ignoring what is clearly in the best interests of students and their learning.  Besides my work in this class, I am involved in several efforts to move more in this direction, and I am glad to have this impulse reinforced here.

Video Conferencing: Week 2

Unfortunately, I was unable to participate in the live video conference, due to parent-teacher conferences at my high school.  I did view the recording, and found myself interested in putting voices with names from class.  Much like providing pictures in our profiles the live video conference seems to add human contact to the class.  This is an extra benefit beyond the utility of asking and answer questions about the course live.  I will need to learn more about the hosting this type of event when I teach a fully online class, possibly as soon as next fall.

Assessment in E-Learning: Week 2

I am very excited about the intersection between my E-Learning class and the classes that I am teaching.  My high expectations for class were validated this week as I incorporated work from class into my Anoka HS AP European History class.  After working with the wiki for Assessment and at Datta Kaur's suggestion in class discussion, I created a pbworks workspace for APEH.  

The first assessment project for which I am using the wiki site is a collaborative essay writing project.  Groups of three or four students will each be responding to free-response question prompts from past AP tests.  Students will compose parts of their group's response, edit each others' work, and, most critically, record the reasons for their changes in the comments.  This provides metacognition and allows me to assess their writing.  I took this idea directly form Susan Vanderpool, a techer from New York who suggested it on a list-serve for AP Euro teachers.  Knowledge networks are powerful!

Week 1 of Assessment in E-Learning went well, and I am confident that the course will improve my practice.  We have already begun working on a wiki.  I see great possibilities for wikis as sites for students to collaboratively construct knowledge, but I have done very little with them thus far. 

On the advice of our instructor I have created a PBworks worksite for my AP European History class.  On the recommendation of another APEH teacher I will assign student groups to collectively write essays in response to prompts from past AP tests.  The wiki comment section should facilitate metacognition amongst the student group and will allow me to assess their writing fluency.

Beyond this exciting development, it seems like a friendly and engaged group of classmates from a variety of educational perspectives.  Over 150 messages on the introductions board, and counting!  Looks a good group.

Welcome to my E-Learning weblog.  Initial posts will focus on assessment, as I am creating this for an Assessment in E-Learning class through UW Stout.

Cheers,
Eric