Learning On The Job

Thanks to Tom Barrett for the inspiration!

After finding this blog entry, I quickly went to find one of our more open-minded English teachers (Mr. Whatley) and shared with him what I found. I was particularly interested in the unit on Travel Writing that he does and thought that Google Earth would be a perfect medium for giving his students – many of them EAL students – that extra bit of scaffolding needed to really create some extraordinary writing.

He did me one better and has decided to use Google Earth as the tool for creating life maps for the students. The ability to embed images and videos as well as add written text will really help these life maps come alive! Plus, with the ability to create a narrated tour, the students will also be focusing on the oral component of MYP English.

Mr. Whatley is also having the students create a map of the nomadic protagonist’s journey in Bloomability, a la Google Lit Trips. I can’t wait to see (and share!) the results.

The Problem

I’ve searched everywhere for a digital gradebook solution that can handle the rigors of criterion-based assessment. The MYP isn’t predicated on percentages (how can you give an 84% for an English essay anyway? How does it differ from an 86%?) but rather descriptors of performance. A mark of 4 out of 8 doesn’t mean the student got half of the things correct; it corresponds to a description of the work. A good description of the nuances of MYP assessment can be found here (.pdf).

Since I couldn’t find a decent ready-made solution I decided to create one. I’ve tailored it to the needs of my school: we are a tablet PC school so I thought it would be nice to use the stylus to input the marks. I’ve also created several iterations for different MYP subjects to fit with their specific criteria and grade boundaries. The Math version is linked below. It’s nothing fancy; just an Excel document with a few macros (nothing malicious, I promise!). It gets the job done, though.

The Walkthrough

Summative Grades – This is for the major summative tasks. Each task may be assessed on more than one criterion so it is important that you input date and title for each criterion used.

Formative Grades – This is where homework can be recorded. You can also assess classwork on specific criteria or record results from quizzes. I was thining of the old +, √, – method here and used a numerical equivalent.

ATL Skills – Approaches to Learning, for the un-MYP among us, are specific study skills that are explained in detail through the program. I found it useful to track these ATL skills to better provide reporting data.

The Macros

At the end of each reporting period the teacher is required to determine at what level each student is performing for each criterion. To aid this, I’ve set up a simple sort macro which groups all of the same criterion grades together in chronological order. You can then return it to its original order by using the date sort. It’s probably a good idea to put in the reporting period headers and date first before sorting by criteria so that you have a place to put your final assessment.

The Disclaimer

Like all work on this site, these gradebooks are shared under a Creative Commons 3.0 Non-Commerical Share Alike license. If you find ways of improving upon this, I would love to know!

Download: MYP Gradebook Math (.xlsm)

Over the past few weeks, I have been finding Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr using Compfight and FlickrCC that I felt represented the 10 attributes of the IB Learner Profile. Check out the original posts – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 –  and the subsequent discussion in the comments.

I’ve had a great time completing this activity. I originally envisioned this as an Advisory activity,with the outcomes of making the Learner Profile more relevant to students and giving them a sense of ownership of these (possibly) abstract concepts, as well as teaching students about Creative Commons, Flickr and various CC search engines. I’ve realized that this is way to big to be done in total by students learning about the Learner Profile. It took a lot of time and effort to think of and locate meaningful and appropriate visualizations of the 10 attributes. I think the hardest part was trying to strike that balance between literal and abstract representation. This really drives home the power, the importance and the difficulty of teaching visual literacy.

Okay, so here are my interpretations of my Learner Profile images. Feel free to comment below.

Top Image: Knowledgeable – One of the most literal images of the series. What represents knowledge like a big ol’ stack of books?
Bottom Image: Thinker – I was going for a primate version of Rodin’s The Thinker.

Left Image: Risk Taker – Another pretty literal image.
Right Image: Reflective – I was inspired by the adage “The eyes are the window to the soul.” To be reflective one needs to be able to look inside oneself, to stare at one’s own soul.

Top Image: Principled – This is probably the biggest stretch of the lot. When I think of principled, I think of having firm beliefs and strong ideals. To me, the pillars of the pier represent the principles that support your beliefs.
Bottom Image: Balanced – This one was for Adrienne, my aspiring yogini friend.

Left Image: Caring – Living in Tanzania for 4 years, this image really resonated with me. It is such a common sight to see young children caring for even younger siblings. I love the title of this image as well: He’s Not Heavy, He’s My Brother!
Right Image: Open Minded – In order to be the architect/builder responsible for this building, you have to be pretty open minded! In my opinion, this is the weakest image of the group but I struggled with how to visualize open-minded. I thought of merging the old with the new (an old Japanese woman in kimono talking on her iPhone, for example) but couldn’t find the right image.

Top Image: Inquirer – The raw curiosity of the boy peeking under the fence gets to me. What’s he looking at? I want to know!
Bottom Image: Communicator – This one was much harder to find than I thought it was going to be. I was initially looking for a multi-tasker – maybe somebody talking on their mobile while sitting at a cafe IM-ing with somebody else – but couldn’t find the rght image. I then decided on this image. I liked that it was lo-tech and that he is listening rather than speaking.

I have placed the hi-res versions on Flickr. Each pair of photos will print out on a single A4 sheet. Feel free to use them as you see fit. Or, even better, add your or your students’ interpretations to Flickr as well so that we can all play “Guess the Learner Profile”. If there’s interest we can get a Flickr group started.

Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 have been posted earlier.

Here are the last 4 learner profile attributes.

Guess the LP pt 4

Guess the LP pt 5

Your interpretations in the comments please!

Part 1 and Part 2 have been posted earlier. Be sure to check out the comments for some great insight…

Here are the next two learner profile attributes:

Again, your interpretations in the comments are appreciated!

You can see part 1 here.

Here are the next two learner profiles. (The picture on the right is the wrong orientation – for that I apologize.)

Make your guesses in the comments!

The IB Learner Profile is pretty important, if you teach in an IB program(me). Heck, it’s pretty important even if you don’t. Who doesn’t want their students to be inquirers, knowledgeable, thinkers, communicators, principled, open-minded, caring, risk takers, balanced or reflective?

I’ve been trying to push this idea for an advisory lesson but with no luck so far: ask students to search for CC licensed photos that represent the IB Learner Profile. This would get the students really thinking about what each of those terms mean and how they can best represent those ideals. It would also be an excellent way of introducing Creative Commons to students (and teachers).

I thought I’d give it a try myself. My initial attempts have been more on the literal side so they might be easy. Can you guess the Learner Profiles? 

Last week our Science Head of Department was ‘lecturing’ to her Grade 8 class, reviewing the different parts of plants. In addition to providing a cloze-type graphic organizer, Andrea decided to open up a backchannel using Today’s Meet  for the students. After briefly explaining what a backchannel was and how the students might use it, she started on her lecture. In her own words:

When I was first exposed to back channel chat at a conference last year, I couldn’t really think how I might use it in class. A year later, with my 8th graders happily typing and inking away on their tablet PC’s  I was eager to try it and see what the possibilities might be.

 

I decided to use Today’s Meet in a class that was more of a lecture style. Students would be responsible for listening to my lecture and filling in blanks about our Plants topics Roots and Stems. I was curious to see how it would go and my initial idea was that it would be a way for me to check their understanding. I instructed them that if they had a question they could type it there and I would stop to check every 5 minutes or so and answer any questions. I also mentioned that if they heard me say anything interesting that wasn’t on the notes they were given, they could add that too.

 

The kids signed in and each said hello and I was curious to see if they would stay on topic or not. Interestingly when I first stopped to check, there were questions and comments about my speed (I was talking too fast for some) and even better, some students had already started to answer questions that had been posted by others! I immediately thought that this would be a great extension for kids who are better listeners and quicker at lecture type activities. I taught them how to use the ‘@’ symbol to do a direct reply so that if they were replying to only one student, it would be easy to see who they were answering.

 

We continued on and they stayed focused. I prompted them to find websites and post them in the back channel if they found things that they thought might be helpful. Many of them did. I was very happy to see the majority of students flipping back and forth between the note and the chat with ease-it seemed to work well for most of them!

 

I was also amazed that one of my quietest students, who won’t raise his hands in class was asking loads of questions of me and his peers on the back channel.

 

It was a great experiment and helped me to guide my lecture during the process which was great. Most students were eager to use it again, after all chat is an interface they are VERY familiar with! Today’s meet also can be copied and pasted into a word or One Note document so that a transcript of the session could be available for students too.

After the lesson, we discussed the positives:

• The transcript is a huge plus for EAL students.
• The students really got in to helping one another.
• For the vast majority of students, they were in a comfortable environment (IM’ing is a favorite past time of most students!) and adapted easily to the ‘academic’ nature of the task.

And the possibilities:

• Student can supplement the discussion with links.
• The backchannel can be used as a differentiation tool: it can be used to extend the strong students (by finding additional content/support/links) and to support the weaker student.
• It can also be used to accommodate different learning modalities.
• If you collect data on learning styles (such as Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of Intelligence or Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences), assigning different dedicated scribes with different learning styles might capture a more complete picture of the lecture.

Do you use a backchannel in your classes? What effective strategies have you discovered?

Image Credit: What’s Your Backchannel by debs (CC BY NC SA on Flickr)

It’s a shame that we’re just finishing up Quadratics Functions in my IB Math SL course today. After being pointed to the Radio Lab podcasts from NPR by my buddy Shane, I found this video on parabolas in the real world. 

It would be interesting to start the unit next year by doing the same pendulum experiment, showing them this video and then discussing the imagery that is shown.

If you were going to center an entire unit on quadratics around a single concept/idea/question, what would it be? Using the MYP holy triumvarate of Significant Concepts, Unit Questions and Area of Interaction focus, this video compels me to think of universal laws (SC), “Why are parabolas used in art and architechture?” (UQ), and Human Ingenuity (AOI).

(For the non-MYP crowd out there, what would be your theme of your parabolas unit?)

You mean I can tag individual posts in my Google Reader? Why did it take me so long to see this?  So, as I’m reading dy/dan or The Number Warrior or Math Stories and am inspired by their ideas, I can 

immediately tag them with the appropriate class name so that I can find it again when I need it? 

Did anybody else know about this?  Master of the Obvious, indeed…