Finding the Digital Equivalent

Thu. Oct. 25, 8:30 - Noon - 45 min- 10:50 to 11:35, third of three sessions

Lightening Round

what they need: created tinyurl for website url

Set Up- Bring some paper copies of assignments and Making the Leap Handout

• bring up our googlesite page
• How many groups will there be? If more than 4, create Assignments 1B, 2B, 3B and 4B as needed by copying and renaming the google doc.
• Are people in groups now? if not put them in

Outline of 45 minute workshop:

1. Lecture- Why consider a digital assignment- Measuring the same outcomes in different ways (10 min max  lecture)

2. Case study- example of what they’ll do in the activity: Allyson Mount’s class (5 min demonstration)

3. Activity:30 min student activity

PART 1 . Lecture.- Jenny with any fill ins from Judy

Why consider a digital assignment? 10 min max

in this session we'll think about converting an existing assignment to include digital media

 Increases quality and decreases cost.

We want every assignment to:

1. increase student learning,
2. give us an idea of where students are 
3. be manageable from teacher time perspective. -amount of time spent creating, managing and evaluating or grading assignment should be balanced with the importance of the learning

Digital assignments can help in each of those areas.

A.  Increase Student Learning

• Increase student engagement and learning
• Feedback time: Decrease time between work submited and feedback to students
•  Increase real world skills   Digital artifact creation is good in itself, insofar as student use tools that will be useful to them in “real life”

B. Where students are

• Allows you to evaluate student skills you may not have been evaluating or were evaluating in different ways, like organizational skills, creativity, translating ideas from one medium to another.

Variety in ways of assessing

Too often a paper is how we assess every learning objective

Examples:

·         Examine a supreme court case

·         Describe a political candidate’s platform

·         show how renaissance theatre differed from medieval theater

·         Could these objectives be met with other than written text?

Are there other ways you could measure student progress on these?

• If your assessment method is aligned to your learning objection, then 1 assessment strategy can’t work for all things. All assessments should not be papers
• There should be a symmetry between your objective and your assessment.
• A method of assessment like a paper bring with it assumptions about what the objective is
• One assessment strategy can’t work for all things. All assessments should not be paper

Jenny transition to part 2:

PART 2: Scenario

Judy: takes over as narrator

Intro: We will present a scenario involving a professor who wants to make a change in her assignment and will work through the questions that you will be working through in a few mintutes.

Judy: Professor, can you tell us in 25 words what your original assignment was?

Jenny: For a constitutional law course, the assignment was to research a supreme court case and write a 10 page paper that demonstrates your grasp of the case and its implications. Give a 10 minute in-class presentation.  

Judy:What was Your Motivation to move to something digital?

Jenny:

• decent-enough student work, but projects felt routine and were not particularly engaging
• Too many students in class to make in-class presentations viable. Too much class time needed
• multiple student presentations were boring
• some students had a really good analysis but were such bad presenters that it was painful and distracting to watch
• attendance at a faculty technology institute gave me time and space to think about how to rework the assignment.

Judy: What alternative did you choose?

Jenny: I chose a narrated powerpoint saved to a video file also called  screencasting

Judy: What was there about that alternative that appealed to you?

Jenny:

• it offered a way for students to explain their points using both graphics and text
• it allowed me to avoid 19 student presentations at the end of semester: I didn’t have time for them and they were not much fun to listen to.
  

Judy: What other alternatives did you seriously consider? Why did you reject them?

Jenny:I rejected webcam video - rejected because students get distracted by their looks and it’s cumbersome to give feedback to.Plus it doesn’t give stu oppty to translate thoughts into images.
        

Judy: What advantages does the digital alternative you chose have over the traditional assignment

Jenny: It forced a rethinking of the students’s assignments when they had to summarize their argument with  graphical representation.Tthey found that it was not as clearly written as they’d thought and they had to actually re-think their argument. “Trying to represent an idea clearly in a diagram or picture often helped students recognize areas where their verbal explanation needed clarification, and consequently the slideshow and narration both improved. This was exactly the kind of true revision-and-rethinking I had tried to get students to engage in on essays in the past – frequently with a frustrating lack of results – and here they were recognizing the value of such revision on their own!”
Judy transitions to Activity

PART 3  Participant activity

30 min 

Judy: Now it’s your turn. You will be given a student assignment which includes the objectives for that assignment and a short rubric for evaluating it.

Your group should discuss and brainstorm what opportunities the assignment affords for a “digital alternative”.

Because this is just as much about a thinking process as a product, Choose someone to take notes on your process. Please take the notes on the Googledoc for that assignment.

.

Next you’ll have 4 minutes to read the assignment.

Then... brainstorm in your group how you might change it. Use the Making the Leap to a Digital Alternative help sheet if it’s useful.

You’ll have 20 minutes and We’ll report out then. You will also all have access to the notes being taken at each table.

Use the decision aid Making the Leap to a Digital Alternative.[SHOW]  this is available as a link on our google sites page.(Bring 8 copies) It provides questions to ask when brainstorming and Possible Digital Activities and Their Tools

Directions in brief format:

Use same groups as before (maximum 4 people)

• Groups are given an activity handout (in paper and digital) which contains: description of a  traditional assignment that includes objectives/goals and a rough rubric  (like a research paper, a writing assignment, lab report. These are google docs 1Assignment1,2Assignment2, 3Assignment3, 4Assignment4 ),
• Step 1: Choose a recorder to take notes on your process.(1 minute)
• Step 2: The Pencils Assignment - Read the traditional assignment description.(4 minutes)
• Step 3: The Pixils Assignment-- Working as a group brainstorm and evaluate various digital alternatvies. Use the decision aid Making the Leap to a Digital Alternative. ( I envision this being available digitally AND in paper)  Decide on one that best adds a dimension to the assignment without compromising the original objectives. Recorder complete the questions (figure out how to tell the recorder where to go to type) about that alternative.
• Step 4:Group reports out: (5 min per group X 5 groups =25) based on the answers to the questions listed here right now

IDEAS for ANSWERS

Assignment 1

• Still pictures are explicated on a blog with text describing people who attended or public ritual aspect of event.
• Student tape speech and annotate it on SoundCloud with a “what he’s really saying here”
• short video segments of speaker articulating an ideology that undergirds his political perspectives with additional analysis by student

Assignment 2

• Timeline tool that allows inclusion of other events happening at the time of the mathematician

Assignment 3

• create a slide show of still pictures of poverty and illustrate how that type of poverty has increased or decreased in the last 20 years.
• create a desktop video explaining 1 theory of social stratification and analyze one problem using that theory.

Assignment 4

• on a map show route, climate, topography, hydrology, agriculture, religion, language