A new start (blog) and a new (school) year.
My goal with this blog is to help me organize my ideas as well as share the ideas I find and use from all the amazing people I have followed for years. This is here to be a resource and reflection place for me.
The first thing I wanted to tackle before I get back to school is homework. My district got a new books for 2 of the classes I will be teaching this year, so I want to have a strong personal strategy before I go in to prep. My beliefs are that the way homework is currently done in problem sets and worksheets is not very valuable to me or the students. That doesn't mean that practice is not valuable or necessary, I just am not a fan of the methods I have adopted.
I want to students to be the captains of their own journey in my class but I still need them to get to the same place. A part of me wants to get rid of homework all together but I think that would cause waves in the school unless the whole department can get on board. So I do have some constraints on what I can do.
First, there needs to be some practice or research done outside of class time. And due to department policy it needs to something will be graded. Now I have enjoyed looking at some of the ideas presented by druin and also at pythagoras was a nerd, because I think these would fit most easily into what my department currently has and allow me to stay sane.
Second, the homework needs to be something that the students do. Here is the magical unicorn for all teachers. How do I make sure the students are the ones doing the work, not other students and not the web? Right now I have one idea and that is to make students content creators. To have the students produce a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly piece of media. Podcast, Vlog, Blog, Instagram feed or something that would tackle topics they pick from the standards and concepts we go over and then have that be publicly available.
My question is how do I create a one time rubric that would address these different media and stress that the math teaching and learning?
What issues will I run into?
How can I stay organized with a bunch of different media coming at me and still give timely feedback?
Hey James - saw your tweet, and understand your issues with homework.
ReplyDeleteI personally love the idea of students creating a piece of media. I'm retired now, but in my last couple of years I asked my students to blog. I did not perfect the practice but loved what they produced.
I'm a part-time instructor for a university, and I love using rubrics. Your post has me thinking about how to offer my students more choice in presentation style. I did a quick search for a "generic" rubric that might work for all of your presentation styles. Check out this one: http://cte.sfasu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Multimedia-Presentation.doc
If you want to talk more about this, I'm Beth (AKA Algebra's Friend on Twitter, Facebook, and my email is algebrasfriend at gmail dot com.