Group items tagged

If computers can score writing, of course the first use will be for assessment. No surprise there. But how might we use this more creatively?

I tried to bring an scoring software program into my school. Nobody liked it except for myself. I thought the objective measure would be more motivating to students. But the other teachers thought that the students should have more practice with rubrics themselves. My school focused heavily on peer editing and scoring. Also, when teachers see such a large number of average scores they tend to disbelieve the results. For example, when I score the essays, there may be a lot of 'B's but I've sees the difference in between Betty's 'B' and Joe's 'B'. The grade is more of a reminder of my experience scoring Betty's writing. When the software scores it, I haven't necessarily seen the essay therefore the score doesn't mean as much. Of course the scoring makes much more sense for official assessments. Open Ended Responses are a much better measure of a student's understanding than multiple choice, if the software is able to distinguish the nuance of language. Some programs are scoring grammatical patterns, sentence length, and paragraph length; therefore, a student can be totally off topic and get a high score. I'm curious if this latest software corrected for this.

Diedrich on grading.

sixth grades connecting writing and media to science

An anti-gaming perspective for learning...

PDF reader for the iPad that lets you "write-on," hi-lite and annotate documents.

Following increasing amount of disruptive technologies in Higher Ed, and announcement of MIT/Harvard EdX platform, author claims to check in with students. Does not really live up to the title (as he does not write enough about conversations with students), but it is a question that does need to be asked. Here is part one of "Did Anyone Ask the Students?" http://chronicle.com/blogs/next/2012/05/01/did-anyone-ask-the-students-part-i/

Seth Godin is giving away a book online, encouraging it to be spread among teachers and getting hundreds of thousands of readers. He usually writes about marketing and the spread of ideas, but he takes on education in this series of blog-post-provocative-conversation-starting writing. He states, "School was invented to create a constant stream of compliant factory workers to the growing businesses of the 1900s. It continues to do an excellent job at achieving this goal, but it's not a goal we need to achieve any longer."

If everyone is learning to write code for the internet, will we see an explosion of new sites, apps, and even games?

A free tool to create and visualize your own tag clouds. Useful to analyze group themes in student writing. Sharing this data and the corpus of students texts, either synchronously or asynchronously, seems to be the key to upping the level of engagement.

"Study suggests new video gamers face immediate drop in reading, writing skills at school"

How are games aligned with visual, kinesthetic, auditory and read/write learners? Read on.

Back to the main course- Poetry, which often seems like an esoteric borfest in school, is given relevance when learners see it as useful and meaningful. This illustrates an important principle for me about engagement. With or without technology, usefulness and meaning are the deal makers or breakers.

An opinion piece addressing the iPad in higher education hype: Lindsay Pund is a junior studying English and Business at Whitworth University. She is completing several writing assignments for a class and was given the topic by the Tech.pinions columnists of forming an opinion on iPad and higher education from a college students perspective.

Etherpad is a hosted web service that allows really real-time document collaboration for groups of users. Etherpad is open source; you can host your own Etherpad by downloading the source code or try Etherpad for free on one of the Public Sites.

This article applies what we've learned about self-efficacy, interest, and engagement to literacy: "What makes a child an engaged reader?"

Thanks for sharing this, Stephanie. Part of my job is to select books for a reading & writing academy in Seoul, and after reading this article I realized that affective elements of reading play a significant role in my book selections.

Hi Stephanie - The author is listed as working for Reading is Fundamental, which is an organization I now follow for my work on the T545 class project. Part of their agenda is to "prepare and motivate children to read by delivering free books and literacy resources to those children and families who need them most." They focus on reaching underserved children from birth to age 8. I am hoping my website project addresses some of the issues raised in this article. Thanks.

Related to the Pew Foundation Study on Tagging we read earlier in the course... Topic models provide a simple way to analyze large volumes of unlabeled text. A "topic" consists of a cluster of words that frequently occur together. Using contextual clues, topic models can connect words with similar meanings and distinguish between uses of words with multiple meanings. Coupling the use of such tools with blogging allows students (plural) to spot trends in their collective writing. The key is to "share-out" their pieces in weekly class review sessions. This "ups" the level of engagement.

I am posting two articles: 1) Apple's recent announcement about getting into digital textbooks (article/link below) and 2) the criticism (this link) by Hack Education blogger Audrey Watters. Education needs to rethink the need for textbooks altogether. Digitizing them is not the answer. She states, "You can disassemble, reassemble, unbundle, disrupt, destroy the textbook. It is truly an irrelevant format."

Hi Emily - thanks for your thoughts! Bloggers (especially those who use the name Hack in their title) are going to be provocative (one-sided) in their writing... but it helps raise questions about standard practices. I too agree that eTextbooks or iBooks are going to be tremendously more engaging and up-to-date than the ones that weigh down kids bookbags. But now take a look at the other article I posted: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/flow-digital-textbooks that suggests how publishers are not open to new and niche ideas that might be incredibly beneficial to education. The publishing market has a hold on education. Is it possible that the textbooks will not be available across a range of platforms, but only on a few that the publishers agree to work with? Maybe it is time we push for a more open source model... that could also work towards digitizing textbooks... or would innovate other ways for students to access "textbook"" knowledge.

Thanks for the nudge to read the other article that you posted as well! It was a nice counterpoint to Watters and the FLOW platform seems like a promising stab at digital textbooks from an open-source standpoint.

After dinner, when Tom Beasley is ready to take a break from his day job in the Yale classics department, he busts out the comic books. But it's all in the name of education, with a digital twist. Beasley, a seventh-year graduate student, is writing his dissertation on Thucydides, chronicler of the Peloponnesian War. In his evening project, he turns from history to the mythology of the Trojan War - in particular, the comic book series Age of Bronze, written and illustrated by Eric Shanower. Beasley's task: produce a reader's guide to the richly detailed, 31-part (so far) comic series in preparation for its release as an iPad app, intended for classroom use. The digital version, called Age of Bronze "Seen," launches on October 15 and includes maps, genealogy charts, and other interactive features.