Final ABC

For this weeks Blog entry I take a look at 4 essential attitudes of life long learners . This is an article that my instructor hooted from the mission to learn website. The Four essential attitudes that it discusses are directness, open-mindedness, single-mindedness, and responsibility.  The article describes directness as related to confidence but I believe it is more based on your ability to focus and stay directly on task with few distractions. Then proceeds to explain open-mindedness, which makes sense. You need to explore all possibilities if you do indeed plan on growing your knowledge base. Singe mind-ness to me is almost the same as directness. They both deal with the ability to focus on a task and it is hard for me to see much if any difference in this subject based on the authors descriptions. Lastly he describes responsibility as the acceptance of the outcome of the probable consequences of any step. 

I read this article several times and I am not sure if it is do to the authors longwinded vague descriptions, but I fail to see how this article has any merit. It just someone’s verbose descriptions of very similar “attitudes” and it in know way made me a better life long learner.  Check it out for yourself and let me know if you find something that I am missing. 

ABC Distractions

Today I read through an article Engageing, not Distracting, the Digital Generation: Responding to the Times’ Wired piece. It was an article in response to the New York Times article Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction.  The times article is blaming technology as a distracter for student learning, but what it fails to recognize is students have always been distracted by something. In my day it was the ti-83 calculator that you could play Tetris with and if not that then anything else other than school work would grab my attention.  The point we need to make is education should be engaging students. Embracing technology is not the only answer but it is a popular and controversial one. People fear change but when you look at the statistics that say student IQ is going up university scores are at an all time high I think this means we are moving in the right direction.

Final Project

http://masteringaudio.wikispaces.com/1+Home

Here it is my final project! Copy and paste the link to your browser and check it out ;0)

ABC Green School

For this weeks post I once again turn to the website TED.com where this week I took a look at My Green School Dream a talk by John Hardy. John Hardy had moved to Bali when he was 25 found a wife started a jewelry store. Soon he was able to retire and his life was changed when he watched Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. The movie inspired him to give back to the community locally and create a green school made of bamboo. It is now in it’s third year with one hundred and sixty children from 20 different countries. View the schools website to look at some of the amazing architecture.  The school cover your basic reading and writing but seams to focus also on agriculture and green living. A very interesting anti-technology look at education. 

ABC TED Talk

This week while browsing TED I stumbled upon teaching kids real math with computers a talk by Conrad Wolfram. He stresses the lack of interest in mathematics but the ever-continuing rise of importance in the subject. The answer he proposes to fix this issue is for us to use computers.  When defining math he breaks it into four parts posing the right questions, real world formulation, Computation, and finally real world verification. He suggests that the step of computation be left to the computers and the other three be concentrated on by the student. Math he proposes is greater than calculating but for so many years that was stressed because it had to be done by hand. This is no longer the case. He proposes critical reform in computer-based math. Making the subject more practical and conceptual like computer programming for instance. I found this talk very interested because for years while I was in school I failed to see the purpose in math other than to keep my brain in shape.  Finding ways to incorporate real world situations would definitely spark a greater interest in the subject and I believe it would help move us forward.

Rubrics

This week I have been concentrating on how I plan to assess student performance on the digital story project that I am creating for my Digital Mastering class. The task of creating the video is a hands-on performance based assessment that is designed to allow them to demonstrate their knowledge of acoustics and apply it to their everyday listening environment. This is an alternative authentic form of assessment that allows students to perform a task and apply it to a real life scenario.

I chose to use a rubric to evaluate the student projects because a rubric integrates instruction with assessment and can be used as a planning tool for the students as they create. This was my first attempt at creating a rubric and the parts that I found most difficult and time consuming were writing the descriptions for all the individual fields and assigning point values to them. I found this to be a very informative source in helping with assigning points to the fields and converting the rubric scores into grades.

The first rubric I designed for the project I did though the wiki editor on my curriculum page.  It allowed me to make a table with text color and design and it turned out perfectly fine. One down side was that it only existed on my wiki. So I then designed another through my word processing program and made sure to use proper file management by saving it in a folder labeled rubrics in my school documents so that it could be saved, edited, and used at a later time.  I now feel like I have a better grasp on creating rubrics and realize the difference between holistic and analytic rubrics.

Teacher Example

This week I have been working on creating an example of the project I expect my students in my digital mastering class to create. These are university level students all who have a brand new MacBook Pro as part of their tuition.  The goal is for them to create a digital story of their home monitoring environment. What equipment they use, where it is placed, what kind of deficiencies are caused by this placement, and how can this be overcome are the questions they must ask and answer.  This should be a good practical integration of their knowledge into their own home environment.

I have been concentrating on evaluation this week.  Evaluating the links and resources I provided to make sure they reinforce concepts, and evaluating the software options I expect them to be able to create this project with.  For starters I just created an example in PowerPoint and posted it to SlideShare. Then I exported that PowerPoint into slides that were added to iMove where I could fine-tune a narration. This was something that I was not aware of how to do and took me a bit of time searching through help menus and online. The software that I suggest using for this project is very well supported and I now feel confident that if my students encounter any roadblocks such as I did they will be able to find the answers.

Searching for how to better incorporate the audio does make me want to update the original draft of the project so that audio examples of the environment are included as part of the project. This could prove to be a bit more challenging, and I have not quite figured out how this can be accurately accomplished.

In evaluating the links and resources I provided I realized that not every link will pertain to each students project, and since the project is based on their own home environment and equipment they will have to do some research as well. This will allow my students to improve on one of the ISTE NETS-S standards of Research and Information Fluency by letting them evaluate and determine the quality and appropriateness of web resources that will compliment their project.

All and all I think this project is headed in the right direction. To keep updated on my progress check out my wiki-space. The narrated slide show is soon to come, as well a rubric, and hopefully a few more graphics.

Enviroment

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