The most obvious answer would be email. With assignments that take place online, the professor can grade and send comments through an email or similar messaging system. Other programs that I’ve had personal experience with include MyLabsPlus which is a math program that grades your online assignments and provides your scores to you online. If you miss a question, you are notified instantly and there’s even a button that provides you helpful hints to solve the problem.
Tech Tool: Web Resources For Creativity (Poetry 180)All the tech tools in this chapter are web resources, so I picked one of the few that caught my eye. Poetry 180: A Poem a day for American High Schools is an interactive web site designed for students to be read a poem on each of the 180 days of the school year. At the homepage, I was greeted by an introduction by Billy Collins – I liked where this was going. You can follow a link to the list of all 180 poems and take your pick or simply go in order. As a future educator, I have always planned to expose my students to poetry, and this resource makes it readily and easily available to do so.
On page 36 they mention student-centered teaching approaches which I’ve always strongly advocated. Learning should be student driven – teachers are merely the tour guide. One page over I noticed the phrase metacognitive thinking. Metacognitive means “thinking about thinking,” and this book applies it to the classroom in which it is defined as students reflecting on their own learning. I found this concept fascinating; not only can we teach them, but we can give them the tools to self-evaluate their own learning.
A few pages over I stumbled on the term visual literacy which I was unfamiliar with. It means “the study of visualization in all its aspects of communication and education.” This translates to the real world as the ability to decipher and understand things like pictures, graphs, illustrations, and diagrams. I wondered how, if ever, you could measure visual literacy, seeing as other types of literacy have standardized testing(s).
I love Billy Collins and via Poetry 180, our Book Club explored the resources and further researched poetry 'slams' to organize our April "Poetry Month" activities...it was successful in involving more students in poetry. Billy Collins hooked up with an animation company to animate some of his poetry readings - posted on YouTube!
ReplyDeleteStudent-centered teaching is an ideal, but so often elusive. Keep it in focus, though! :)