Well this last week of class included creating a rubric, finishing our Pecha Kuchas, and a group assignment evaluating some gadgets.
I like rubrics a lot and have started using them more lately. It just takes a bit of time to create the good ones. That is part of the advantage, though. Creating a good rubric for a project or assignment means sitting down and spending time internalizing what the project is meant to be doing. You are essentially analyzing the worth of your assignment. When creating rubrics I find myself either adding or subtracting components of a project after the deeper analysis. Rubrics are great for eliminating any obscurity as far as what is required of students and it helps guide you in the grading process as well.
Pecha Kucha was still a painful assignment for me. I thought it would get better once I was done with the storyboard but it was still a struggle. Timing was still an issue. My fluency and smooth talking was just not there. You know how people say "you have a face for radio"? Well, I "have a voice for blogging", haha. I did like my picture selections and think they really added to the presentation but the rest of the Pecha Kucha was very hard to piece together. I wouldn't choose this method for a presentation - it just doesn't cater to my strengths. I'm glad I was exposed to it, though.
Overall, I liked the texts for this class and I have a strong feeling I will reference them again. Especially the sections of Presentation Zen where they provide and display examples of good presentation techniques. I'm happy that I got a chance to experiment with Animoto and I absolutely loved using VoiceThread. I am currently planning a collaborative lesson with another teacher using VoiceThread - can't wait to use it with the students. Posterous was neat but I'm taking a break from it right now...I have a few ideas for future use but the picture a day looming over my head forced me into some pretty lame pictures just so I could have something posted. With the freedom to take pictures in the moment I think it will be much more effective. I just looked back to see if I missed anything and I wanted mention the quotes research we did. I actually used a quote in my Pecha Kucha and look forward to adding more to presentations. Fun class.
Laurence-
ReplyDeleteThis class was fun and much so a learning experience for me. I am learning a lot and I can see myself using voicethread and Animoto as well. You are not the only one that had problems with the Pecha Kucha, ha! I struggled with speeding up and slowing down, then my words were getting cluttered, hard for the audience to understand. I did my best. As far as the Posterous assignment, I feel the same about taking lame picture because we had to take it for the class. I thought oh I am short a picture so let me take a picture of anything. After reviewing some other classmates pictures, I said I need to do better, but that did not work. I think this would've been a wonderful assignment if we had a longer period and not a limit. If we were told to just take a picture of anything, I like impromptu pictures and random pictures, not a "force" pictured. Nevertheless, the assignment was cool and different. I understand why he wanted us to do that though, at first I thought, ugh why?!?, ha!
I am sure your class will love the voicethread projects, keep it up and let us know how it turned out.