Culminating Project is Ready!

I am so excited to say that my culminating project for EME5050 is completed and everything can be found on my wiki which is located at  http://oneclayvirtual.wikispaces.com/.  I guess I'm so excited about having everything completed that I remembered to "hoot" about it, but forgot to post in my blog.  I hope you enjoy viewing my WebQuest for 11th and 12th grade virtual students to learn how to create a resume for one of the jobs "of the future."

Creating a Rubric to Assess My Digital Storytelling Project

EME5050 - Activity Reflection #7

This week in our graduate course on the fundamentals of technology for educators we have continued to work on our digital storytelling projects and we have come to the point of designing a rubric to use as the assessment.  If you are not familiar with the term rubric, it can be characterized in many ways.  It is an authentic way to assess how students solve real-world problems.  A rubric is built on a wide range of criteria and the students normally are given a copy to use as a guide as they complete real-life projects.  This type of assessment is known as formative because it is involved from the beginning to the end of the entire teaching and learning experience.  There are two different types of rubrics and they are called analytic or holistic.  As I read through this week’s online readings for our course I found the following definitions for the terms analytic and holistic on the TeacherVision.com web site.  “Analytic rubrics identify and assess components of a finished product.  Holistic rubrics assess student work as a whole.”  For the digital story I am developing for this particular course, I chose to design an analytic rubric.  I believe it will be the best kind of rubric to use to assess my student’s e-resumes they will be creating.  In this post I will be sharing the reflections of my experience of creating my rubric and I will share my thoughts on the role of rubrics in authentic assessment and when I believe authentic assessment is the best strategy.

I need to start by saying that my digital storytelling project has been an ever evolving process and I’ve been tweaking and revising it regularly.  Hopefully I finally have it to the point where I want it and I believe that is because I have finalized the rubric with which it will be assessed.  This is a digital storytelling project and therefore I have made sure that it is built around the seven elements that are key to a good digital story.  For this project the students will be given a WebQuest to follow in order to use web sites on the Internet to find answers that will help them create their own job resume.  Besides being Internet-based, there are other elements that also make this project digital.  Students will be asked to use Prezi and Jing to create an electronic version of their resume instead of the more common paper version.

My project is designed for 9^th – 12^th grade virtual students and I tried to make the rubric as grade-level appropriate as possible.  I also tried to make it as “self explanatory” as possible because it is for virtual students who may be at a disadvantage because they don’t have the opportunity for face-to-face encounters with their teacher.  I like the idea of giving these students (any student for that matter) the assessment tool upfront so they will know how to fashion their projects as they are being developed.  As a student myself, I like having “the big picture” early enough in the game so I can see how all of the pieces are going to fit together.  My students will be solving a real-life problem because they will be asked to create a job resume that will get them an interview for they think would be the “perfect” job for them.  There is also a dramatic twist to this project because it is built on the scenario that the students have been transported from the current year of 2011 to the year 2020 in order to help save the workforce and the future.  (Enough about that, you’ll have to watch the digital stories to see how they end.)

Creating my rubric wasn’t really difficult and I there are different reasons I can attribute this to.  First, I’m accustomed to having my work assess with rubrics and I have many examples to refer to from the two graduate courses in which I’m currently enrolled.  Also, the Internet is full of great examples, explanations, etc. on how to create and use rubrics effectively.  I have to admit I did do some tweaking and revising over the course of a couple of days, but I feel like I created a solid rubric with which to evaluate my students’ digital stories.

Rubrics are wonderful assessment tools, but there are certain teaching and learning situations for which they are best suited.  This digital storytelling project is one instance and others would be solving real-life problems and project-based learning.  Rubrics are very versatile and they can actually be utilized across all curriculums when teachers want to improve the types of projects their students create and therefore increase their overall learning.

I’d like for you to take a look at the “E-Resume Rubric” I created to use to assess the digital stories my students will be creating.  I would appreciate any constructive feedback that you have to share.  Use this link to access my wiki where the rubric I created is posted in the WebQuest my students will be using for this digital storytelling project. 

Creating an E-Resume for the Year 2020

EME5050 - Activity Reflection #6

As we have recently worked with wikis and WebQuests in our graduate course on the fundamentals of technology for educators, I have been experiencing some rather steep learner curves.  WebQuests are something with which I was familiar, but I had never created a wiki. On top of that, we were introduced to Prezi which is the “zooming” presentation software.  It is an awesome little program and it makes PowerPoint look rather linear. I must say that I have really been impressed by the currency and thoroughness of our textbook for this course.  Shelly, Gunter & Gunter presented us with a text that is filled with a tremendous selection of very valuable online technology resources.  I have therefore enjoyed reading the different chapters (yes, completing the quizzes) during each week of this course.  This past week we were given the opportunity to choose from two different activities to complete.  The first choice was to create a storyboard for the proposed digital story we will be asking students to create.  The other was to create an actual digital story like the one we would like our students to create.  I chose the latter, and this post reflects that experience as well as our recent readings from our text and online module.

This week was basically a continuation of last week as we continued to develop our wikis, WebQuests, and digital stories.  As many of my classmates have also commented, it seems like I keep finding something to tweak on my wiki or WebQuest.  I’ll have to admit that I did a little more than just tweak in the past few days.  I revised a lot of my WebQuest which then caused me to have to revise my wiki.  It pretty much became a “domino effect.”  My original digital storytelling project was going to be a culmination of the WebQuest with students using PhotoStory 3 to create electronic resumes.  That all changed this week when I decided it would be much more fun to have the students create their e-resumes using Prezi.  I say “more fun” tongue in cheek because Prezi is so radically different from the more common PowerPoint or PhotoStory programs. I really like the way I can upload and place images within my document without disturbing the text and the flow of the Prezi feels very “unique.”  I should also say that I surprised myself by choosing to use Prezi because I had previously hit a learning roadblock and not just a curve when it was first introduced.  No matter how I tried, I just couldn’t get the hang of it.  Literally I had to sit down with my laptop and go through the online tutorials and then get my hands on the software to actually learn how to use it.  Now I’m really glad I did.  I learned that when I put my mind to it, I can do just about anything.

This digital story I’m working on for our class has been “a work in process.”  In the beginning it was going to be called “All About Me,” and it was a digital story that virtual students in 9^th through 12^th grades were going to create to introduce themselves to their online teacher and classmates.  Then last week, much of that started to change.  The students are still 9^th through 12^th grade virtual Language Arts students, but they will be completing a WebQuest that will result in an e-resume that they have created in order to obtain a futuristic job in the year 2020.  During the first part of their quest, the students will explore the meanings of their names.  Next, they will continue with more self-evaluation by completing different online personality tests.  After that, they will research today’s top jobs in 2011, and then they will compare these jobs to those that are predicted to be the “hottest” in 2020.  The underlying goal of this entire process is for these students to find just the right job for themselves for the year 2020.  Oh yeah, don’t let me forget that in addition to everything else, the students will be learning how to write a good resume and then they will learn how to transform it into a GREAT electronic resume using Prezi.  Please note that I realize most resumes are only text, with no graphics, but because this is an e-resume for the year 2020, it has to have images!

My only concern right now about my digital story project idea is that I can’t stop wanting to tweak it and make it better.  I’ve been told by some that I am sort of a “perfectionist.”  That can get exhausting because I won’t let things alone.  I’ll let you take a look at my e-resume that I created as an example for students to have as a reference point.  I hope you like it, and I appreciate any constructive advice you can give me to make it better.

~Enjoy!

Ruth Paine's E-Resume on Prezi

In the Year 2020...What Will the Top Jobs/Careers Be?

EME5050 - Activity Reflection #5

This week has been a real learning process...
In our graduate course on the fundamentals of technology for educators we have been learning how to teach students to create digital stories.  This week we started putting our plan into action by creating a curriculum page for the type of digital story we would like our students to create in the future.  This curriculum page was created using a wiki of our choice, and I chose Wikispaces for Educators.  It is a free Web 2.0 tool and was a great tool for creating my curriculum page that was in the standard format for a WebQuest.  My curriculum page is "still under construction," but I'd love for you to take a quick preview.  The following is my reflection of creating my curriculum page using Wikispaces, but first, I'd like you to use this link to take a quick look at what I've done on it so far.

I started out this post by saying, "This week has been a real learning process."  It was a good learning process now that I look back on it, but as I was in the midst of it, I felt very frustrated at times.  This was probably because I felt I had to go out of town for business unexpectedly and the hotel where I stayed didn't have adequate Internet access and I was stuck in a storm for 48 hours.  I did make it through, and I'm really excited about the idea for the digital storytelling project I'm working on, but I'm really "feeling the growing pains" now.  I am also very excited about getting to share my digital storytelling idea with teachers in my district.  The first group with whom I will work on it will be the new virtual teachers we will be hiring soon for our new virtual school which is called the "Clay Virtual Academy."

The idea for the digital storytelling project I'm developing is for our future virtual students to complete a WebQuest in which they learn how to create an e-resume (electronic resume) using the PhotoStory 3 software program.  You've already had a quick peek at the project, so I believe you know how I've started structuring the WebQuest.  I am looking forward to completing the development of this digital storytelling project and to the point where I'm actually training teachers how to use digital storytelling with their students.

As I said, this week has been a real learning process.  I learned how to create a Voki which is the customized speaking avatar you saw at the beginning of my WebQuest.  The voki I created is named "Virtual Vincent."  All I had to do to add him to my wiki was to copy and paste html code.  It was really pretty simple.  Something else I am glad that I learned this week was how to use a wiki to create a WebQuest.  I've done that before using Word, but it is nice now to know how to create a WebQuest using a different tool.  One stress point was when I had a little trouble figuring out how to embed the Table of Contents at the top of my WebQuest.  When I finally "caved in" and looked it up in the "Help" section of Wikispaces, it became so clear and now it's a "piece of cake."

This week I learned how to use some new Web 2.0 tools, and I feel I'm the better for it.  I'll end with a "play of words" on my last name (which is Paine).  I can literally say, "If there's no Paine, there's no gain."