Week 3

Week 3 in Review

Monday began my full transition to Desire to Learn (D2L) from my Google class site. There's definitely a give-and-take when giving up control from your site to D2L. On my former site I had complete control over the look-and-feel of the site and I miss being able to design a one-stop-shop unit page where my students could see at a glance what we were doing every day for the entire unit and could access any assignment with a single click.

That being said it looks like D2L offers some powerful abilities for automated grading and item analysis for assessments. I can also see where its nice to have a single platform for students to visits for all their classes, rather than having to seek out a variety of webpages for separate teachers.

I've decided to produce some screencast tutorials with Screencast-o-matic to show how I've set up my D2L site and the features I've found most useful this first week.  This is by no means the "right" way to do it; in fact, I'm hoping others reading this can send me their tips and tricks for utilizing D2L. I'm simply hoping to share my journey of finding useful features for D2L.

• Tutorial 1: Organizing
• Tutorial 2: News tool
• Tutorial 3: Automatic grading (coming soon!)

Monday 

Returned Unit 2 tests and students took a 5 question post-survey over Unit 2.  You can see the results here. I'm pretty stoked about the gains from pre to post survey. I've been using Google Forms to administer a pre-post survey and its been pretty easy to collect the data. However, I think D2L's assessment features will take me 1-2 steps further in item analysis by allowing me to drill down and see not just the percent of kids who missed the question, but the specific wrong answer they chose. This will hopefully evolve the conversation from "Why don't my students get this?" to "Why did the majority of students who missed the problem choose answer A?"

We started a new assignment called 1st Quarter Reflections in preparation for parent teacher conferences. At the end of most periods I make students write down a 1-2 sentence reflection on what they learned that day. Students also do this when they get an assessment back and reflect on what the assessment tells them.  For this assignment students had to review their daily reflections from 1st quarter and pick the 5 they were most proud of and explain why they chose them.

I really liked this assignment because (a) it made students be introspective, (b) there was a high degree of creativity and artistic freedom, and (c) because it can serve as a great conversation piece between students and parents on what they've been learning and enjoying in science this year. Here are two examples of student work.

click here to read

click here to read

Tuesday

Finished working on 1st quarter reflections.

Wednesday

Students watched YouTube notes on the Properties of Materials. They first copied the graphic organizer into their notebook from D2L. Then they watched my Part 1 and Part 2 notes off YouTube. I told them we were learning this vocabulary to set them up for the in-class activity tomorrow, where we were going to analyze random objects they'd be bringing from home (which a suprisingly high percentage of them remembered to do).

Why do I sometimes put my notes on YouTube?  (a) student focus tends to be improved because they put headphones on and are zoned in (b) students can pause and rewatch if need be (c) standing and delivering didn't add anything to this particular set of direction instruction (d) absent kids receive a comparable experience. (e) kids who finished early were able to move onto Friday's self-directed assignment and put a bit more time/effort into it.

Do you always do notes on YouTube? Nope. Only when it makes sense to do so.

Thursday

Students brought in random objects and rotated around the room analyzing the objects using vocabulary learned from yesterday's direct instruction. They worked in collaborative groups and moved every 4 minutes in accordance with the beeping sound from my kitchen timer on the board.  It was highly interactive, engaging, and funny to watch.  Students tried asking me, "Mr. Mabrey would you consider this object to be malleable? How about thermal expansions, etc..."  I just smiled at them and said "What does your group think?"

Friday

We processed the results from yesterday and had a class discussion about the trickier objects. Then students opened up a Google docs assignment called Properties Grid.  They're only halfway through and its pretty cool.  Check them out below:

• Properties Grid (Period 2)
• Properties Grid (Period 3)
• Properties Grid (Period 6)
• Properties Grid (Period 7)
• Properties Grid (Period 8)

Lessons Learned

1. D2L isn't scary once you receive some hot tips from someone. Thanks Jill and Lee for getting me rolling.
2. Students really get into creative writing assignments. I was impressed with how many kids loved the freedom I gave them with the 1st quarter reflections project. They seemed pretty proud of the final product.