Steven Butnik’s article Understanding, Diagnosing, and Coping with Slow Processing Speed.
Consider whether the student is being held back by anxiety, a learning disability that is making the content difficult to process, a condition like dysgraphia that makes handwriting especially challenging, eyesight issues that make the board or papers hard to read, or auditory processing difficulties that make working in a busy, noisy classroom very difficult.
In The Power of Validation, Karyn Hall and Melissa Cook define validation as “the recognition and acceptance that your child has feelings and thoughts that are true and real to him regardless of logic or whether it makes sense to anyone else.”
Students who frequently get stuck on school work may lack the problem-solving skills they need to get unstuck. So whenever you can, model your own strategies with teacher think-alouds, and get other students to do the same thing.
Michael Dunlea finds that in many cases students get hung up on one specific aspect of an assignment, so if he is able to figure out what’s confusing them, he can help them continue.
For some people, simply setting a time limit for a task is enough to get them moving more quickly, so it’s worth a try with your slow-paced students. Use this one carefully, though: For some students, it could cause even more anxiety and make them shut down completely.
Break Large Tasks into Small Ones
Offer a “Can Do” and a “Must Do”
Provide Estimated Times for Each Activity
WIRMI Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing by Linda Flower.
“What I really mean is…” and continue in whatever language you would use if you were describing the idea to a friend.
Establish a Bare-Minimum Goal for Formative Assessment
Mix Low-Stakes with High-Stakes Tasks
Mark Problem Items for Later: instructional coach Gretchen Schultek Bridgers advises students who get stuck on an item, especially on a test, to mark it with a small post-it note, a highlighter, or a star as a reminder to come back to the item later. This kind of strategy will be useful to everyone, not just your slow working students.
Digital Portfolios: Facilitating Authentic Learning and Cultivating Student Ownership
presented on Tuesday, March 3, 2015.
Steve Zimmerman (charter school director), New York
digital porfolio software: open source. Google Sites – free, but too laborious for teachers
must be student owned and intuitive interface (you cannot say this about MN eFolio)
assessment rubrics
easy sharing and feedback
accessible form mobile devices (you cannot say this about MN eFolio)
easy integration with other applications (you cannot say this about MN eFolio)
Tina Holland
she is not a test person. good for her.
writing, critical thinking, creative thinking, soft skills (communication, collaboration, negotiation). team players, problme solvers, prioritize,
education is moving from traditional teaching methods, to inquiry based. self-directed learning. from summative to formative assessment
Sophia: Nudged along by my friend Todd Nesloney, I use Sophia for my computer applications instruction and am very pleased with the results.
Haiku Learning: This is the full content management system that I’m trying to get our school to adopt. It’s multiplatform and robust, which makes it a great fit for our BYOD environment.
There are many other apps like Moodle, Canvas, and Coursesites. The point is that you should have one in a BYOD environment.
Assessment Aids
All three of these apps — Quick Key, Grade Ninja, and WISE — are available on iTunes and Google Play, but there are more.
If you’re working with multiple apps like Google Drive, Dropbox, One Drive, Evernote and need to search across them in one shot, take a look at Xendo (http://xen.do) – gives you a personal, private Google-like search across all your apps.
Rubrics: online scoring guides to evaluate students’ work.
Annotations: notes or comments added digitally to essays and other assignments.
Audio: a sound file of your voice giving feedback on students’ work.
Video: a recorded file of you offering feedback either as a “talking head,” a screencast, or a mix of both.
Peer review: online systems in which students review one another’s work.
Two main types of feedback — formative and summative — work together in that process but have different purposes. Formative feedback occurs during the learning process and is used to monitor progress. Summative feedback happens at the end of a lesson or a unit and is used to evaluate the achievement of the learning outcomes.
Good feedback should be: Frequent, Specific, Balanced, Timely
Seminar for U.S. Fulbright Grantees Burgas, June 6 – 9, 2019
June 7, 9:15 am – 10:45 am, Plamen Miltenoff, St. Cloud State University, MN, USA
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Sharing Best Practices for Enabling BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) in Education | Споделяне на учебни практики за усвояване на мобилни електроники в обучението
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Stress and Teacher Burnout: Impact of Mindfulness Strategies | Стрес и прегаряне: стратегии и практики на внимателността
While employers increasingly demand that new hires have college degrees, the transcripts supporting those hard-earned credentials are no longer the most informative tool students have to exhibit their skills.
An estimated 1 in 5 institutions issue digital badges, which can be posted to social media, stored on digital portfolios and displayed by other specially designed platforms. When clicked on, the badge lists a range of skills a student has demonstrated beyond grades.
“The reason they’re taking off in higher education is most employers are not getting the information they need about people emerging from higher ed, with previous tools we’ve been using,” says Jonathan Finkelstein, founder and CEO of the widely used badging platform Credly. “The degree itself doesn’t get to level of describing particular competencies.”
For instance, a Notre Dame student who goes on a trip to Ecuador to build bridges can earn a badge for mastering the calculations involved in the construction, says G. Alex Ambrose, associate program director of e-portfolio assessment at the Indiana university’s Kaneb Center for Teaching & Learning.
Students can be pretty certain when they have passed calculus or creative writing, but they don’t always recognize when they’ve excelled in demonstrating soft skills such as critical thinking, communication and work ethic, says MJ Bishop, director of the system’s William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation.
Badges have been most popular in the school of education—including with student teachers who, in turn, have created badges for the elementary and secondary classrooms where they’ve apprenticed, says Anna Catterson, the university’s educational technology director.
The campus library is another badging hotspot. Students there have earned microcredentials for research, 3D printing and other skills. These badges are being shared on LinkedIn and other platforms to obtain internships and scholarships.
The university runs faculty training sessions on badging and has established a review process for when faculty submit ideas for microcredentials.
One pothole to avoid is trying to create a schoolwide badge that’s standardized across a wide range of courses or majors. This can force the involvement of committees that can bog down the process, so it’s better to start with skills within single courses, says Ambrose at Notre Dame.
When creating a badge, system faculty have to identify a business or industry interested in that credential.
Badges that have the backing of a college or university are more impressive to job recruiters than are completion certificates from skill-building websites like Lynda.com.
Students won’t be motivated to earn a badge that’s a stock blue ribbon downloaded off the internet. Many institutions put a lot work into the design, and this can include harnessing expertise from the marketing department and graphic designers
Tobin, T. J., Mandernach, B. J., & Taylor, A. H. (2015). Evaluating Online Teaching: Implementing Best Practices (1 edition). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
5 measurable faculty competencies for on line teaching:
attend to unique challenges of distance learning
Be familiar with unique learning needs
Achieve mastery of course content, structure , and organization
Respond to student inquiries
Provide detailed feedback
Communicate effectively
Promote a safe learning environment
Monitor student progress
Communicate course goals
Provide evidence of teaching presence.
Best practices include:
Making interactions challenging yet supportive for students
Asking learners to be active participants in the learning process
Acknowledging variety on the ways that students learn best
Providing timely and constructive feedback
Evaluation principles
Instructor knowledge
Method of instruction
Instructor-student rapport
Teaching behaviors
Enthusiastic teaching
Concern for teaching
Overall
8. The American Association for higher Education 9 principle4s of Good practice for assessing student learning from 1996 hold equally in the F2F and online environments:
the assessment of student learning beings with educational values
assessment is most effective when it reflects an understanding of learning as multidimensional, integrated and revealed in performance over time
assessment works best when the programs it seeks to improve have clear, explicitly stated purposes.
Assessment requires attention to outcomes but also and equally to the experiences that lead to those outcomes.
Assessment works best when it is ongoing, not episodic
Assessment fosters wider improvement when representatives from across the educational community are involved
Assessment makes a difference when it begins with issues of use and illumines questions that people really care bout
Assessment is most likely to lead to improvements when it is part of the large set of conditions that promote change.
Through assessment, educators meet responsibilities to students and to the public.
9 most of the online teaching evaluation instruments in use today are created to evaluate content design rather than teaching practices.
29 stakeholders for the evaluation of online teaching
faculty members with online teaching experience
campus faculty members as a means of establishing equitable evaluation across modes of teaching
contingent faculty members teaching online
department or college administrators
members of faculty unions or representative governing organizations
administrative support specialists
distance learning administrators
technology specialists
LMS administrators
Faculty development and training specialists
Institutional assessment and effectiveness specialists
Students
Sample student rating q/s
University resources
Rate the effectiveness of the online library for locationg course materials
Based on your experience,
148. Checklist for Online Interactive Learning COIL
150. Quality Online Course Initiative QOCI
151 QM Rubric
154 The Online Insturctor Evaluation System OIES
163 Data Analytics: moving beyond student learning
# of announcments posted per module
# of contributions to the asynchronous discussion boards
Quality of the contributions
Timeliness of posting student grades
Timelines of student feedback
Quality of instructional supplements
Quality of feedback on student work
Frequency of logins
180 understanding big data
reliability
validity
factor structure
187 a holistics valuation plan should include both formative evaluation, in which observations and rating are undertaken with the purposes of improving teaching and learning, and summative evaluation, in which observation and ratings are used in order to make personnel decisions, such as granting promotion and tenure, remediation, and asking contingent faculty to teach again.
195 separating teaching behaviors from content design
Digital badges unify the learning that happens in these diverse contexts—often at a relatively granular level—with a common and portable representation of achievement.
Digital badges:
include a consistent set of metadata or information about the nature of the assessment, experience, or criteria that led to the skills or competency-based outcomes represented;
incorporate authentic evidence of the outcome being certified;
can be shared, displayed, or pulled into different kinds of platforms and environments in both human-readable and machine-readable formats;
can be distributed in a simple, consistent format, fostering relationship building, networking, and just-in-time career development opportunities;
are searchable and discoverable in a range of settings; and
offer data and insights about how and where they are used, valued, and consumed.
As a marker of achievement, a digital badge looks both backward and forward at the same time: backward to the experience or assessment that was completed to qualify for it, and forward to the benefits, rewards, or new opportunities available to those who have earned it.
Some of the possibilities you might consider include:
Serving as an alternate qualification for lifelong learning. Degrees and licenses certify summative achievements often following formal education programs or courses of study; do your digital badges provide official certification recognizing learning that is more granular, formative, or incremental?
Surfacing, verifying, or sharing evidence of achievement. How can we surface discrete evidence that certifies a skill or accomplishment, and by doing so arm learners with official recognition they can use toward new opportunities? Does validating and making a specific success or outcome more visible, portable, and sharable help a learner move successfully from one learning experience to the next?
Democratizing the process of issuing credit. How can we empower anyone who can observe or assess meaningful achievements to issue digital recognition of those accomplishments, even if that means that credential issuing becomes less centralized?
Exposing pathways and providing scaffolding. How can we better suggest or illuminate a path forward for learners while also enabling that pathway and progress to be shared with an external audience of peers or potential employers?
Supporting ongoing engagement. How can digital badges support learners incrementally as they progress through a learning experience? Can we enhance motivation before and after the experience?
The process for developing an effective badge system can be broken into steps:
Create a badge constellation. A constellation is a master plan or blueprint that shows all of the badges you intend to offer and how they relate to core themes or to each other.
Map meaning to each badge and to the overall badge system. Ensure that each part of your constellation has a value to the earner, to your organization, and to those who would reward or offer opportunities to bearers of each badge.
Identify or develop an assessment strategy. How will you know when an earner is ready to receive a badge? Are existing assessments, observation opportunities, or measures already in place, or does your system require new ways to determine when an individual has qualified for a digital badge or credential? What activities or work will be assessed, and what evidence can accompany each issued badge?
Determine relationships within the system and how learners progress. Is your plan one that shows progress, where components build on one another? How does one badge relate to another or stack to support ongoing personal or professional development?
Incorporate benefits, opportunities, and rewards into the system. Work backwards from the benefits that will be available to those who earn badges in your system. Does each badge serve a greater purpose than itself? What doors does it unlock for earners? How will you communicate and promote the value of your badges to all constituents?
Address technology considerations. How will you create and issue badges? Where and how will the badges be displayed or consumed by other systems and platforms in which they realize their potential value?
Develop an appropriate graphic design. While the visual design is but one element of a badge rich with data, how an achievement is visually represented communicates a great deal of additional information. Digital badges offer a unique and powerful opportunity to market the skills and capabilities of those who complete your programs, and badges promote your initiatives as well as your organization and what it values.