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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ABC AES

This past weekend was the 129^th Audio Engineering Society convention. This is the largest annual gathering of audio professionals. You will usually find workshops, tutorials, technical papers, and a wealth of new audio gear debuting here on a yearly basis.  Some of the highlights include Avid’s release of Pro-Tools 9 software and Rupert Neve’s classic 1073 mic pre in a 500 rack module.   The Pro-tools 9 release is the first time that the software has been offered in a stand alone version separate from any of the digidesign hardware which is exciting for those of us on the move or looking to use other interfaces to incorporate into are audio set-ups.  The 1073 allows us to have that classic 70’s Neve sound with out the $10,000 price tag. Its only around a grand which is actually very exciting. I am currently researching all the new products so that I can incorporate what I find useful into the classroom and so far it seams like there is a lot of updating to do!

Curriculum Page

I like the idea of being able to focus my students learning by providing them with access to appropriate web resources by using a “Curriculum Page”. Expanding that even further by introducing a Web Quest is an invaluable way to integrate 21^st century learning into my classroom. Creating a space that organizes all of the online resources for my class into one curriculum page turned out to be a very arduous task. 

My first attempt began by creating a basic layout of the curriculum page in Microsoft Word. This actually went very well. I followed a basic tutorial and tailored it to my specific area. Next step (or so I thought) was to post this newly created resource to my wiki which I had already set-up this past week on wiki-site. This is where all of my trouble and heartbreak started.

Wiki-site is horrible.  This is not a site I would recommend to anyone who didn’t have four extra hours and the patience to learn a brand new type of editing. The page I designed in word was worthless and could not be posted to this site. So I kept my hopes up and thought “Well it can’t be that hard to just start from scratch using wiki-sites editor.” I was dead wrong.

So in comes Wikispaces and saves my day! I was able to do what took me hours on wiki-site in seconds, and it looked infinitely better. Compare my work to my first wiki.

Obviously it is still a work in progress, and I still need to better organize the content. I will hopefully add more pictures and possibly audio soon as well.  If I need to compress or zip these files to get that to happen I at least have a better grasp on how to do that now.

The last little bit of information I need to gather is to find out how to post HTML on any of these wiki-sites.  That would have saved me an infinite amount of time. The first curriculum page I created in word could have been used, or this awesome webquest template. Once I get passed the technical aspects of designing this curriculum page focusing on the content and ensuring that it complements my class will become my next priority.

7 Ways Games Reward the Brain

Tom Chatfield discuses seven ways in which games reward the brain in this months  TED Talk. It is a very interesting video that talks about how games engage us. It encourages us to evaluate the underling reasons why we are so enthralled so we can incorporate this structure into other areas like business or education.

Chatfield suggests that instead of grading people in little bits and pieces that we utilize experience bars that measure progress over time. Multiple long and short term goals and tasks need to be attacked at the same time to keep students engaged but also provide satisfaction as time passes. He states that all effort must be rewarded in some way large or small and rapid frequent clear feedback must be provided to ward off any frustration. Elements of uncertainty must be introduced to keep us enticed. There needs to be windows of enhanced attention where concentration is focused and moments of release. Finely other people must be involved so we can share and collaborate. 

These are supposedly the underling reasons behind the massive attraction in games like World of Warcraft and Everquest. If we can incorporate this maybe people will become addicted to education.