Week 6: Evaluation and assessment of learners

Summary: 
Why do we assess learners?

• To make decisions
• About students
• Learning
• Placement
• Degree
• Recognition
• Remediation
• About instruction
• Effectiveness
• Pace
• Material
• Coverage

Start with

• Learning/ performance objectives
• Objectives should be clear, measurable, represent knowledge/ skill gains, not activties

Important consideration: reliability

• Assessment reliability
• How consistently does this measure the thing?
• Examples:
• Bathroom scale: if you gain 20 pounds within one day, then you will question the reliability of the scale
• Driver's test
• Assumption: assessments should be reliable and not subject to the following:
• Error
• Wide range of interpretations regarding what is being asked
• Limitations of observation

Important consideration: validity

• Assessment validity
• How do the procedures and interpretations support our purpose?
• Content: alignment between test and course content
• Dose the bathroom scale measure weight in pounds?
• Criterion: real-world correlation
• Does the number on the bathroom scale provide us with an accurate measure of weight loss?
• Does the number on the bathroom scale provide us with an accurate measure of fat loss?
• Construct: meaning
• What does the weight mean or signify?

Essay:

• Long or short repsonses to a prompt
• Instructions should be detailed
• Question should specify all expectations
• Criteria for scoring should be cleraly established in form of chekclist  or rubric
• Easy to writing, time-consuming to score

Performance

• Demonstration of skill
• Can be speech, project, or other format
• Instructions should be detailed and specify all expectations
• Scored according to detailed criteria in the form of checklist or rubric
• Reliable assessments are difficult to write and time-consuming to score

Personal interview: (eg qualifying exam, conference presentation)

Decision points:

• Why do we need to know this and what do we need to know?
• During instruction (formative)
• Following instruction (summative)
• Remediation opportunities?
• High stakes? SAT--> the purpose is not valid, but the test itself is valid and reliable. Using SAT as an indicator of school performance is a wrongful claim.

Reflection: 
           One of the things I have been missing out is the connection between learning objectives and learning content. There is always a weak link between these two nodes in my lesson plan. In fact, I believe many teachers, especially novice ones like me, oversee this link. Well, instead of saying "oversee this link", maybe I should say that I always determine my teaching content first and then write down my teaching objectives based on that. It is easier for me to design my teaching without setting up the objectives first. 
          I understand that my design order is wrong. I should determine teaching objectives first and then design my teaching content according to that; otherwise, it would be meaningless to set up objectives. Yet, it is really difficult for me to think and design in this order. What should I do? 
         In addition to the instructional design perspective, Dr. L introduced several handy technologies for evaluation and feedback. iRubric is the most useful one among all. I definitely will use it for my future teaching and our final project. StudyBlue seems pretty cool, too. I might try to use it for self-study purpose. Polleverywhere is fun and eye-catching, but it is only useful in large-scale classes. If it is a small class, I can just ask students to respond by raising hands or answer my questions. Another drawback of using Polleverywhere is that it gives students a legitimate reason to take out their smartphones or laptops, which may become a serious distraction in class. 

Week 5: Motivation-Reflection on our major project

Our major project for R541 is to create a webquest for preservice teacher in W200 to learn how to incorporate Personal Learning Networks (PLN) into their teaching as well as for their professional growth.
During the class discussion, Dr. G tossed out a question regarding our major project: "how are you going to motivate a bunch of 19-year-old college students to learn something they do not care about at this point of time?" Great question. We didn't really think about that.

I guess, in order for students to be engaged in this topic, we will need to take the following steps:

1. In the introduction section, we can provide some fun videos to demonstrate why learning about PLN is important  in terms of building up individual's professional image and benign professional connections.
2. We can also provide interview recordings of the Jacob teachers (the outstanding educators in Indiana) speaking about incorporating PLN as examples to demonstrate how PLN has been successfully used to increase students' learning effectiveness and motivation. 
3. One of the tasks in the process will require students to create a PLN community (e.g. a facebook group) for learning PLN. In this way, students will gain a sense of ownership and a sense of achievement during the process. Through the collaborating learning and social interaction in the group, students will also understand the value of PLN in terms of learning as well as professional growth. 

 Those are the ideas we have so far for motivating our students. Let us know if you have some other ideas!!

How to use Photoshop CS6 to erase unwanted photo background

So I just learned how to use Photoshop CS6 to erase unwanted photo background today, which brought me a great sense of achievement. haha~
For those who lack the drawing skill as I do, I am going to demonstrate how I erased the photo background through Phtoshop CS6.

Step 1: Go to IUWare (http://iuware.iu.edu/Windows) and download the Adobe CS6 package. It's completely free for IU students. 


Step 2: Open the images in Photoshop. Click on "File" and select "Open" to open the images you want. 

In my case, I am going to erase the background of the following pictures, so I will open all of them in Photoshop. But today, I am only going to demonstrate how I erase the background based on the third image.

Step 3: Right click on the "Quick selection tool" on the left-side tool bar and change it into "Magic Wand Tool". 

Step 4: Click on the unwanted white background. 
Use "shift" key to select all the noncontinuous white parts at once. The parts being successfully selected will have dotted delineation. Zoom in the picture for parts that are hard to click on.

Step 5: Go to Menu bar and click on "Select", and the choose "Inverse". 

Now you will see the Eiffel tower has dotted delineation instead.

Step 6: Click on the "Add a mask" icon on the bottom right. 
Now you will notice the background has been removed.
Also in the layer column, there is a layer mask thumbnail. The black part means the part you don't want and the white part means the part you want to keep.

Finally, after finish adjusting the color of your image, save the image as a PNG or JPEG (if you are not creating your infographic in Photoshop) and we are good to go!!

 This is how I created the first section of my infographic. Hope you find this post helpful~

My infographic storyboard

Here is the initial planning and wireframing of my infographic.
I have also created a prezi slide as my storyboard to demonstrate the logic behind all my design decisions.

Knowledge map for F.Y.I. major project

Janet, Fallon and I are designing the Personal Learning Networks webquest project together as a team. We call ourselves "F.Y.I.- Facilitate Your Ideation".

Here is our knowledge map for the major project proposal.

Week 4: Representation for our major project

Our group is going to design a webquest for learning how to  incorporate  "personal learning network" into instruction. The target audience is  a group of IU preservice teachers who are learning how to use computer in education. 

Based on the readings and Dr. G's lecture on imagery and representation, here are some considerations about the representation for our project.

1. Graphic organizers: considering the purpose of this project is to teach preservice teachers how to incorporate personal learning networks, one of the potential graphic organizers we may use is a flow chart that help learners visualize the instructional design process. 
2. Accuracy: Personal learning network (PLN) is a very concrete idea. It refers to websites such as Facebook, Twitters etc. I think, in terms of giving PLN examples, we may use more accurate, figurative pictures to illustrate our points. However, in terms of understanding the whole idea, some abstract images may be included. 
3. Clarity: the learners will have basic understanding about PLN prior to our instruction, so they are not considered totally novice in this circumstance. Therefore, clarity of our representation may not be high. 
4.  Learner involvement: the nature of a webquest instructional design requires learners' high involvement. The level of understanding the learners need to achieve should enable them to design PLN instructional activities independently. This will also meet Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive levels "synthesis". 

Tutorial session: Infographics-Planning and Wireframing

• Web designer vs web developer: very creative example of how to use infographic to present comparative information. Helpful to my infographic assignment. 
• wireframing:
• Title
• Intro paragraph
• Other information sections

• Determining what to visualize
• Infographic is journalism meshed together with design . You are taking research and data, and displaying it in a way that is accessible to a larger audience.
• Citing information.
• Generate questions pertaining to the central topic
• See if the illustration answer our question

• Two principles for inforgraphic dumbers:
• Is the data interesting to the audience
• Can the subject be easier, or more fully understood, via imagery than plain text?

• Use excel spread sheet to organize your data
• Overview-sections (table of content)
• Different tabs for different sections
• Give each section a title

• Find stories in your data:
• Find out the interesting facts from your data

• Choosing the right visualization (charts I hadn't considered in the past) 
• Bubble chart
• Timelines
• venn diagram
• Pictograph
• Relationship diagrams
• Glyphs

• Planning dimension:
• Where? Blog, textbook…?
• Photoshhop--width: 850; height:5000 (crop it later)

• On photoshop, use transparent rectangle (or any other shapes)to create your wireframes.