The Living Schoolbook

This fall we are planning to upgrade our instance of the Open Source Portfolio (v2.0) to Sakai/OSP 2.2.  

Our existing system, the Dialogue Project, has been running for almost as long as I have been here.  The Dialogue Project was meant to be a platform for connstructivist teaching strategies and it heavily relied on graded conversations as the primary means of assessment.  Faculty use has been changing during the past five years with more faculty electing to use "One to one" conversations in place of "Small group" conversations.  Whether this is in response to accreditation demands, time contraints, training or the relative effectiveness of small groups as a teaching strategy has not been determined.

In Helen Barret's latest blog entry she again cautions against the misuse of portfolio systems to meet program assessment needs. While reading it and considering our own set of "Goal Aware" tools in development, I considered how we were addressing this problem.

Although our PT3 funding was originally earmarked to develop a student centered portfolio system, our goal aware development is centered around courseware tools that (among other things) will be used for program assessment and eventually accreditation requirements. While we could have spent our developer's resources to improve the student-centered, reflection-rich portfolio system, we limited our technical staff's involvement in OSP software to configuration of the toolset instead. There a number of reasons that we have focused our development on courseware tools, but I think I can justify it.

There are really 6 steps to the Goal Aware Activity process.

1. Establish Goals and Sets of Goals (create and publish them).
2. Associate Goals with Activities (tag/link an assignment with a  goal).
3. Engage students with the Activity and make them aware of the Goals.
4. Evaluate student performance against a rubric for each linked goal.
5. Analyze the results.
6. Correct instruction/activities/program.

During step 2 we ask faculty to provide a rubric and a "rationale" for the link between the activity and the goal.  While I was giving a demonstration of the Goal Manager and Goal Aware Assignment tool today at the Sakai conference I had a funny realization. I realized that the faculty are going to blow off the rationale.  Like my grandma used to say, “Dimes to donuts” they are not going to provide meaningful information here.  

Tanya Silverstein has a project in mind.   She wants to share a collection of annoted pictures from a collection that she has in iPhoto on her Mac.  It used to be that the LSB would help a teacher to learn how to make a web site from scratch using tools like Dreamweaver.  It was painful work, but teachers learned a lot and had a unique product that they had some sense of ownership of.

The elementary education program has trained many teachers on how to integrate software into the curriculum. Inspiration has been a tool that we have seen teachers make use of to help students scaffold writing and facilitate brainstorming activities. Many teachers in the field are not even aware of Inspiration, nor are they willing to go through the trouble to jump through the hoops required to get it installed on computers.

"Web 2.0" (man, I hate this buzzword) technologies offer the opportunity to distrubute javascript or flash based applications through the web. The only technical piece that a teacher needs to make certain of is that the computers that the students will use has the necessary plugins installed and that the web site hosting the application is not blocked by their firewall.

Here is my attempt at creating a narrated tour of the Onondaga Creek watershed using Google Earth and a demo version of Snapz Pro X.  Somehow, the video and audio get a little out of sync.  However, its was very easy to do after I decided what I wanted to show.  I created a series of waypoints to take the viewer on a tour of the creek from the headwaters, through the Onondaga Valley and to Onondaga Lake.

I recently added a map interface to Project Watershed's water quality database web site.  The Project Watershed board member actually are supposed to use the web site to add water quality data after they sample a stream with students.  In the past I would have used a number of screenshots and text to instruct them how to use the new site.  Today I quickly made a narrated Quicktime movie of the web browser as a "screencast" to get the idea across.  While not everyone could use the movie, I really think it is an effective tool. 

Between the sessions (and during some of them!) during the 2003 Closing the Gap conference I meandered the vendor exhibits.  I learned about a lot about the specialized software and hardware that existed for the assistive technology market.  I was amazed at the number of vendors and the range of technology that existed.  Here were some ofthe vendors I wrote a note about after a day in the vendor halls:

Don Johnston

BuildAbility - www.donjohnston.com/catalog/buildabilityd.htm

This multimedia authoring tool allows teachers and students to create simple, linear multimedia presentations with digital pictures and movie clips. When viewing the finished product, there are hooks built in for switches to allow the student to choose when to advance. It looked very easy to use and the finished product contained the player so that it could be taken home to Mom and Dad.

Not everything I saw at the 2003 Closing the Gap conference was related to a specific technology.  This session address best practices for creating buttons for AAC devices.  Here is my post from just after the conference about that session:

Many AAC devices use a grid layout as navigation for the device. Most allow the therapist to customize the layout and navigation as the student grows and learns. This may mean the addition of new words/utterances or entire new groups of phrases and words.

The first step determining grid layout depends on screen size, fine motor skills of the student and cognitive ability of the student to handle many choices. The size of individual squares can not be too small for the student to navigate well and the number of choices available can't be confusing and/or lead to a lot of "hunting" for the correct choice.

In 2003 when I went to the Closing the Gap conference I learned about a metadata standard  

The Resource Centre for Academic Technology at the University of Toronto is helping to develop "accessibility specifications" for elearning objects.

Typically learners access educational content (learning objects) in a limited number (usually 1) of formats. Textbooks are difficult to get access to in any other format, transcripts of videos are often not available, etc. By separating content from presentation and control, learners with disabilities may be able to access content more readily.