Boris, a Chemistry 11 teacher, might be interested in a website called, “Quizlet”. Quizlet is an online flashcard-generating-tool “created by high school sophomore Andrew Sutherland in Albany, California… As of January 2014, Quizlet ha[d] over 35 million user-generated flashcard sets and more than 11 million registered users.” (Wikipedia, 2007).

Quizlet even has several sets of cards for students wishing to memorize facts about the Periodic table, such as this set. The flash cards can be used in a multitude of ways. You can view questions and then guess the answers, or you can view the answers and try to think of the guiding question. You can set it to scroll through at a timed pace, set the cards to play randomly or in order, and/or manually click each card to your own pace. You can even have the website read the text on the card out loud for you. After testing your skills with the flash cards, there ,are tests designed based on the card questions which give you feedback of how you are doing, such as this one, again on the Periodic Table.

If unfamiliar with Quizlet (as I am), Boris may choose to challenge his students to create their own set of flashcards, or perhaps divide up his class into subgroups to have students create groups of flashcards. For example, each group could focus on a single family of elements (a single column on the Periodic Table). By dividing the students into groups, and challenging them to create specific sets of cards, the students will be actively engaged in constructing their own reflective learning, and it won’t seem as such a monumental task as creating flashcards for the entire Periodic Table. This exercise would help meet many conditions outlined by Gibbs and Simpson (2004) as being critical to assessment, specifically:

1. Assessed tasks should provide students with enough time to learn the material. By creating flashcards, students will be revisiting knowledge learned in Boris’ class and reinforcing that new knowledge in new ways.
2. Engaging students in a productive activity related to learning. Allowing students to take ownership for their learning as a collective may prove beneficial both to the individual, and to the group. In the words of Terry Anderson (2008), “…the group itself is an educational resource with characteristics that are different than the bounded interaction among two or more learners registered in a course.”

In the end, Boris and his students will have created one, large, comprehensive set of cards to cover a vast amount of material. The generation of the cards themselves could even be assessed by Boris to see the thoroughness / complexity of each groups’ work. The design of assessment and the feedback Boris would provide to each group would be essential to the learning of each individual within that group. According to Gibbs and Simpson (2008), his feedback needs to be: detailed, focused on their performance as members of a group, focused on their learning, timely, appropriate to the task at hand (ie. the criteria is crystal clear and allows students to develop deep understanding of concepts), and also attended to by the student (ie. the student will use the feedback to further improve upon and strengthen knowledge of concepts).

One challenge within this scenario could be access to this online resource. Some students may have limited or no access to the internet, especially if living on the outskirts of their town in the Bulkley Valley. However, because Boris “uses his school district’s Moodle server to disseminate lecture notes, lab forms and to answer student questions outside of class time via a discussion forum”, I will assume that most if not all of his students do have access to the internet in some capacity.

Just as an aside, and because I find the Periodic Table to be pretty cool (fully admitting that I am a Chemistry nerd here), you should check out this Periodic Table online. It’s interactivity and layers of knowledge is pretty staggering!

1(2007). Quizlet – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved March 2, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quizlet.

Anderson, T. (2008). Towards a theory of online learning. Theory and practice of online learning, 45-74.

Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2004). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and teaching in higher education, 1(1), 3-31.

Sharing.

For my activity, I have designed a Discussion forum for students to share a bit about themselves. Students will take photos of themselves and upload them to a Flickr or Picasa Web Album account. They will then share their pictures, which are representative of their “world”. The idea is to show, through photographs, who they are. At this point in the course, the emphasis is on community-building rather than skills of photographic composition and the rubric assessment I designed asks students to post a specific number of photographs and encourages sharing clear pictures, but does not assess the quality of the images in themselves.

Asynchronous Rationale.

I have chosen an asynchronous mode for the first week so that students have time to explore both the LMS and to become familiar with sharing images through online platforms. To support students I have also generated a separate Discussion forum within the Introduction section of the course where students (and teacher) can trouble-shoot technology issues as they arise. The rationale for choosing such a communication method is simple: comfort. I believe that if I give students time to explore, they will become more comfortable with both sharing and with their own technology skills.

Attributes of Forum.

For my activity I chose to employ a forum type which resembled the standard “blog-like format”. I personally like how information gets chunked into visible “blocks” with user names and dates of when contributions were made. A blog also shows the most recent entries at the top, so for those who are active within this community, they can easily keep up with the dialogue and not have to scroll way down a lengthy page to find the latest replies.

I have also required that students create at least one discussion and then reply to at least one post other than their own. This will help to build community and also give measurable guidelines to those who perhaps are more reluctant to contribute initially, while others who are excited to view contributions are not “capped” to what level of sharing and replying they choose to offer.

I enabled a date which I “expect completed on” to further encourage students to make contributions in a timely manner and so that I will be able to see who made contributions by a specific date and who has not. To this end, I also chose “show activity as complete when conditions are met”. I am a little confused as to how I will be notified when the activity is completed, or if this is for students only (ie. only students are notified that they have in fact completed an activity with a check mark listed beside the activity in the Module page)?

Mel Burgess.

Welcome to UBC Blogs and my first post for ETEC 565A.
I am a science and computers teacher at the Adult Learning Centre in Duncan, BC. I am new to the world of blogging, but love to tinker and try to be creative. I have two daughters who keep me very busy outside of school and study times. I love to hike, play guitar, and will cheer for the Canucks even when they lose.

http://flic.kr/p/9SkamW

As a bit of an aside, I have something to share with you regarding staying organized. You probably already know about “Sticky Notes” on your computer. I started using them, and liking them, to post little snapshots of my week. They stay on my desktop and serve as reminders of what to do next!

Because the life of us “MET-ians” can be very busy and some weeks I feel like I need a checklist or my mind will implode, I will continue to use technology to help me stay focused and set micro and macro goals.

Thank you Sticky Notes.