Success!

photo © 2010 J. Enokson | more info (via: Wylio)



Happy, happy! Joy, joy! My digital storytelling culminating project is FINALLY complete! It can all be found at my fully revised Wiki.

What an exciting way to end the semester.

Get Your Quick Rubric Fix!

When you think of a rubric, what comes to mind? Probably some type of chart with headings and empty boxes, right? I know that’s exactly what I imagined. But thanks to our nifty friend, technology, rubrics are now so much more. This week I used iRubric to create a project rubric for my digital storytelling project I have been working on. In the past I have used Rubistar, but it was so long ago I don’t remember much about it. The great advantage of using iRubric is that you can quickly create rubrics online that will automatically weight and grade assignments for you with just a few clicks of your mouse. Here is the rubric I created for my project. All I would need to do to grade is click on the cell in each row that the student satisfied, and the tool produces a grade for me!

Why am I creating a rubric in the first place, you ask? The digital storytelling project that I am working on is a way to perform what Shelly refers to as project-based assessment.  It is a type of authentic assessment associated with authentic learning. (2010) Students will be engaged in authentic learning while completing my project, because they will be dealing with real-life problems and solutions, critical thinking and creativity, and creating a product to show off what they have learned. Any time students produce a final product as a result of their learning, it is a good idea to use a grading rubric as a means of authentic assessment. 

In case you’re wondering just what, besides typing and clicking, goes into rubric creation here are the steps I took to prepare mine.

1.     Brainstorm the types of skills you want your students to practice by completing the assigned project. A great place to start is the lesson standards. You will want to grade performance of these, because you want to be sure your students are all demonstrating them proficiently.

2.     Consider any content that absolutely must be seen in each final product.

3.     Create categories of skills such as Lesson Standards, Content, and Presentation and Design. While not always necessary, these helped me cover all the bases in terms of what I wanted demonstrated.

4.     Decide if and how you want to weight different areas. For example, demonstrating a lesson standard is pretty much always more important than writing mechanics. Assign different points to each skill based on importance, and be sure they add up to 100.

5.     Finally, before entering your info into your rubric, consider how many levels of skill your students can demonstrate. For mine, I chose 4 levels ranging from Poor to Excellent. Each level should convey a certain level at which that the student could potentially demonstrate that skill.

6.     Enter in all the information for your rubric, and you’re good to go!

Have fun creating your own rubrics with iRubric, and remember that you can edit them any time to more appropriately fit a different grade level or assignment. 

Shelly, G. B., Gunter, G. A., & Gunter, R. E. (2010). Teachers discovering computers:   

            Integrating technology and digital media in the classroom (6^th ed).           Australia:

            Course Technology Cengage Learning.

A Work In Serious Progress...Seriously

As my digital storytelling project develops, so does my idea of digital storytelling. As a reminder, I am working on a project for fifth grade students integrating technology into the social studies curriculum. These imaginary students will create digital stories in groups based on the recent disaster in Japan. This week I was responsible for either storyboarding an example project or creating an actual example. I decided to storyboard for two reasons; the first reason was lack of time, and the second one was my desire to create the rubric before the example. I wanted to decide specifically what I would expect of students before I created a project that may end up not meeting those expectations. I have never storyboarded before, and I am not very good at pre-planning. That said, here is a VERY rough draft of my sample digital storytelling storyboard.

I am well aware of just how rough it is, and I’m sure my Prezi I plan to create will not look a whole lot like this. I just wanted to give myself a starting-off point . I’m sure my storyboard looks like something one of the fifth grade students actually doing the project might come up with, but it gave me a good sense of what I want the project to be. I decided through completing this exercise that each group would be assigned a type of person or group such as a student their age or a family that lives in Japan. They would base their story on what happened to these people over the course of the disaster, and their plan to assist with relief efforts would need to be based on what could specifically help their assigned “character.” This was a big change from my original plan which would have been more of a presentation than a digital story.

I think once I create the project rubric, I will be able to also create a project example that best displays everything I would expect of students. I already feel much more confident in this project and what it is becoming. Hopefully one day I will be able to adapt it for my real class.

I Can Wiki, You Can Too!

It wasn’t too long ago that I simply didn’t know what a “wiki” was and how it worked. I knew what Wikipedia was, but I did not realize that this huge website was just one example of many wikis found on one site. It never occurred to me that I might use wikis as a teaching tool. Nowadays it is becoming more and more common for teachers to replace the classic curriculum page with a class wiki. This is presumably due to the ease of wiki use as well as the versatility. You can essentially create your own free webpage, easily edit it whenever you want, and you can allow others to edit it as well. 

When creating my own wiki, I chose Wikispaces.com as it is very educator-friendly. There are many other wiki sites one can use depending upon preference. I wanted to keep it very simple at first, and I ended up with this. It was incredibly easy; all I had to do was create my account click edit, and start typing! The page is an example of what my real class wiki could look like if I had my own class. I am currently working on creating a digital storytelling project for fifth grade students, and this page serves as a resource page for these hypothetical students. In time I will be adding sections including an area for student groups to collaborate on their projects together as well as project specifics and examples. 

As with all online class tools, safety is very important. Assuming I used this wiki with a real class I would want to take precautions to make sure their safety and privacy was ensured. There are ways to set privacy controls on Wikispaces and other wiki sites.