Arts Education

One of the first posts I ever wrote for this blog was about using the PARCC rubric for Narrative and Analytic Writing to create a rubric that I could use for lab reports. My reasoning was that some of my students would experience PARCC tests and using this rubric would help cement it in their minds. Also, that rubric was developed by a team of people and I believed it to be stronger than what I had been using.  I used my adapted rubric for one year, and Ohio gave the PARCC tests one time, but then our state legislature voted to abandon PARCC and write our own state tests. This happened during the summer and when it was time to start school, a new rubric for writing had not emerged, so I stuck with the adapted PARCC rubric last year. Now Ohio has developed rubrics to use with its newly designed assessments, so a friend and I adapted the Ohio AIR rubric for Explanatory Writing for this year's lab reports. Here is what we came up with: In past years I provide students with a set...

In April I posted about my use of Chalkup to teach a PD course. This summer I used Chalkup again to teach a new section of that same class and I found another feature that I really liked - the collaborative discussion. We chose a text that we wanted the participants to read and we attached it to a collaborative discussion in Chalkup . We also posted some questions about the reading and vocabulary. Then participants read the article and, as they did, they commented on the text using some cool commenting features. You can attach a comment to a point (that you create) or to some text (that you select) or to an area of the text (that you select). Others can respond to your comments and create their own, all in the same document. The result looked something like this: I like the idea of this tool to help with close reading and to get initial ideas on a text before discussing it widely in class. Maybe students could read and comment or select text as evidence while they read. Then, after ...

Last week I presented at my district's Blended Learning Conference. I had seen a blurb about Mentimeter , so I tried it out. I liked it a lot (details below) and will definitely use it again! Mentimeter captured my interest right away because it offers question types that I haven't seen with a lot of other formative assessment tools. In addition to the standard multiple-choice type questions, mentimeter offers word cloud creation and sliding scales and a 2x2 matrix. I love a 2x2 matrix! Here are the question types: After you log in to your account, you create a "presentation." The presentation consists of the questions you will ask. My presentation was just a quick poll at the beginning of my session about web tools we all use to bolster our own professional development. I started with the word cloud question you see above and followed up with the sliding scale question below: At the session, it was very easy to launch. Click the name of the presentation and you are ...