3D Printer and more Technology in the Classroom (plus the last Step II lesson of the semester)

 The week before Thanksgiving was pretty busy as it usually does as the semester draws to a close with all of its final presentations and final exams. I think that the first thing I want to talk about this week is my final lesson for Step II since I will be writing 5E lesson plans to close out the semester. Unlike the two previous lessons, my time management was poor. I made the strategic decision in the middle of the lesson to forego the evaluation I had prepared since our statistical examination that closes Step II will look at one evaluation in particular. The lesson was productive for my own growth. Upon reflection, I realized why my time management was so bad. On the surface, it looked like I had just allowed students too much time in the exploration section of the lesson. Looking more closely, I realized that I should have stopped the exploration section. Many students gave answers that indicated that either the lesson section's instructions were unclear or that the students ...
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The Creation of Rubrics and using Technology As an Aid

 This week gave us something new to think about--building rubrics. Most of my own classes use them but I never thought much about them until this week's classes. To me, they always seemed fairly generic and lacked any real feedback on the part of the instructor. Part of our work on rubrics is to make them thoughtful so that students receive adequate feedback on their work. Luckily, there are several online sources that create rubrics and are editable. Those we saw in class were different than the BrightSpace rubrics in our classes. 

We started by creating rubrics for our own work; in particular, the websites that we made for our science experiments. The big lesson for me here was that we should be careful when working on the categories of our rubrics. For example, you don't want to have a rubric that tells students that they achieved an acceptable level of mastery when the point totals that correspond to those categories add up to a less-than-acceptable score. There is an obvious craft to making rubrics that are relevant and adequate to assess student performance. It feels like with careful planning these rubrics can add value to the classroom. 

I looked around at what others had written about this topic. (It was good to see that there were a handful of seemingly good papers on the topic but not so many that the literature appears overwhelming)

The highlights of my perusal were these papers (that I list for posterity):

Grading+with+Rubrics.pdf (pbworks.com)

Birky, B. (2012). Rubrics: A good solution for assessment. Strategies, 25(7), 19–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/08924562.2012.10590978

Quinlan, A. M. (2012). A Complete Guide to Rubrics: Assessment Made Easy for Teachers of K-college. United States: Rowman & Littlefield Education.

The last citation looks like a book that treats the subject matter thoroughly and I have already put it in my downloads so that I can have the book on a Kindle to read later.

In any case, this week's lessons made it clear that work as a teacher needs to incorporate rubrics. No doubt, the cost to create them is paid when the rubrics are good and combined with lessons that have been perfected to use them.

While this blog may be for Step III, I had my first Step II lesson this week. Since Step III discusses technology in the classroom, I want to reflect on that theme in the context of my Step II lesson. Specifically, I learned that sometimes less is more. I had prepared a lengthy set of slides for my first lesson but after my practice lesson, I went back and incorporated earlier suggestions for a shorter and more student-centered set of slides.

The students responded well to them and the engagement activity went smoothly, it clarified the later parts of the lesson and there was plenty of interaction. I found that focusing on the smaller set of slides made it easier to focus on the lesson, probing questions, and teacher "moves." For me, there was an improvement that stood out compared to Step I and that is that students were clear about the lesson in terms of what they would be expected to do in the Exploration portion. The use of technology in this first Step II lesson was overall a success because it augmented the lesson and improved upon my earlier Engage sections.


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