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My Project Implementation at Ulatina (Part II)

As I posted last week, as part of my implementation of my "online" project with my reading skills students at Ulatina, I want to explain the steps I followed this particular week.

STEP 3: A Wiki for gmail addresses and blogs' URLs

Prior to the class, I created a Wiki in Google Sites as part of the implementation of my project. Once I had my students' email addresses, I sent them an invitation to join me in this site for them to have access to everyone's mails.

In this very moment, I keep on updating this "site" with the blogs' addresses students are currently creating for their reading projects.

If you want to take a look at my BIN-08 Reading Skills II's Wiki, click over here:

https://sites.google.com/site/bin08readingskillsii/

STEP 4: WebQuest Creation

Before Thursday, February 25 class, a WebQuest for the short story written by Nathaniel Hawthorne entitled "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" was created. Since this story is part of our course syllabus, it was easy to adapt it for this online experience.

During the process of creating a WebQuest to fit all requirements a Quest must have, the complete task was carefully planned, and it can be accessed at:

http://bin-08-reading-skills-ii.blogspot.com/

It must be stated that one of the most pain-staking tasks in planning a WebQuest was the creation of the rubric that goes along with it. Each single step that you want students to follow must be carefully recorded and then taken into account for the evaluation. If finding the sources you want students to check is time-consuming, carefully designing the rubric for the final product evaluation is a long process that will get to see its product at the end of the task.

STEP 5: Student Blog Creation

As part of our regular class on Thursday, February 25, students were explained, by using the WebQuest, what they were supposed to do, step by step. Since none of them had ever worked with a WebQuest, they were told to follow the whole process sequentially. Besides, they were also told about the resources available for finding the information requested through the task, and how they were going to be graded at the end of the process.

After the explanation of the WebQuest, students were instructed on how to start posting on their newly-designed blogs. They were helped in case something related to the project was not clear to them. And in some cases I took some time to work individually with them to have all the information straight by having them actually do everything so they could taste what to create their own blog was all about.

As the WebQuest states, they now have a week to complete it.

STEP 6: WebQuest Assessment

This will be the next step for this project by using the rubric at

http://www.scribd.com/doc/27452699/BIN-08-WebQuest-Grading-Criteria

Eventually, they will start interacting among themselves to provide feedback to each other.

Friday, February 26, 2010

My Project Implementation at Ulatina

Course Project 3 comments

Dear colleagues and instructors,

To give you a brief account of what kind of technology-oriented changes I wanted to do with my BIN-08 Reading Skills II students, I would have to say that I wanted to create "Reading Blogs" that somehow reflect what we are reading for this class: Short stories. The idea of having students create their own blog was to have them work on the analysis of selected stories rather than having quizzes about them. The analysis of the stories implies identifying the theme, create a characterization chart for the story characters, a plot analysis with introduction, rising action, climax, and resolutiion, and a summary of what the story is about. To accomplish all this, a WebQuest will be created so students can post their findings. Then they will be able to interact with one another about their final products.

STEP 1: Thursday, February 11

After I have explained my students what we were going to do with the following quizzes, which now will be online assessments, the very first thing I asked my students to do was to open a gmail account to have full access at blogger.com. I asked them to send me their addresses to keep a record of all students who did it, and to talk to those one who "forgot" to do this.

Secondly, I asked them to start reading the story we will be using for this PBL assigment: Doctor Heidegger's Experiment by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Once they read it, on their own, they will start completing a short story plot analysis chart to get the gist of the story.

STEP 2: Thursday, February 18

Due to the fact that this particular page was not available for public use at Ulatina, I asked our Facutly dean to help me out with this issue. The idea behind eliminating this restriction is related to the opportunity I had to demonstrate the use and settings of the blog for my students in class. Because we have Internet access in class and a giant LCD screen in the classroom, explaining how this is started -step by step- was "piece f cake." To do this, I just followed the step-by-step description given to us by our instructors, Ms. Jeffs and Ms. Healey.

With the information provided in class, they have to start their blogs and send me the corresponding URLs before next class.

And what surprised me the most is the fact that some of my students, by the time we had class, had already created their blogs including profile information and their own photos. (These "kids" are sure digital learners.)

STEP 3

Although I am in the process of working on the next step for this project, I will design a WebQuest related to the story to fully develop my idea (What I stated in my introduction to this post.). As soon as I have it ready for my students, I will also post it over here so everyone can have a look at it. And I would really appreciate it if you can provide some feedback to complete this task successfully.

I'll keep all of you post it with the next step, Step 3.

Jonathan