I was kindly invited by Kevin Johnson to speak on a panel at the annual MSU Certification in College Teaching Institute tomorrow.  Kevin directs the phenomenal Teaching Assistant Programs at MSU.  (If you’re a doctoral student at MSU be sure to check out the College Teaching Certification Program.)

I’ll be joined on the panel by Scott Schopieray and Mark Urbain-Lurain.

Scott’s notes can be found by visiting: http://edtech.cal.msu.edu/events/past/ccti2011/

The charge of the panel is to:

Respond to general guided questions about what you think “works” technologically in classroom teaching (in a variety of contexts), examples/demonstrations of a technique(s) you use that have had success prompting students learning, AND a “thing (or two)-that-really-interests-me” tip or suggestion(s)

I will be focussing my comments on assessment and feedback.  From a pedagogical standpoint these two areas are of paramount important to me. In my teaching with the Master of Arts in Educational Technology program I focus much of my energy and efforts in improving my proficiency in these two areas.

I will share the following examples which I have used in both face to face and online teaching.

Google Docs “Developer Notebook”

Essentially, the developer notebook is text based companion (or “journal”) to a project based course.  The notebook is shared between student and teacher and all feedback is kept within the notebook. From an instructional and assessment standpoint the notebook serves as a cornerstone of the course content and allows the student (and instructor) to see growth over the semester.

More detailed information on the developer notebook can be found in this post:
http://www.leighgraveswolf.com/2010/02/19/google-docs-as-a-developer-notebook/

Verbal & Visual Feedback

As a companion to text based feedback or feedback on rubrics, I also use audio and screencasting (with Jing) to provide feedback.  Screencasting is especially useful when assessing multimedia projects because you can comment on specific areas of the project and actually show what/where you are commenting. Delivering the feedback in an alternate method engages students and provides a different form of assessment that connects with many students.

Two examples/explainations on my use of verbal and visual feedback can be found here:

http://www.leighgraveswolf.com/2009/11/04/adventures-in-verbal-feedback/

http://www.leighgraveswolf.com/2009/12/12/socially-mediated-feedback-the-experiment/

Late Breaking “Just Hatched” idea:

In our summer planning faculty meeting today, Mike DeSchryver and Sean Leahy shared an excellent assessment idea that they have developed for our summer face to face teaching.  It’s called “Read and Tweet” Essentially, students will take time out of the day (and in the evenings) to do the assigned reading and tweet questions, ideas, comments while they are doing the readings.  These tweets will be used to a) asses their understanding and engagement with the texts and b) be used in class discussions. Last summer we used HootCourse with great success to parse out discussions on Twitter and I believe Sean and Mike are planning on using HootCourse for this project.  Keep an eye out on the #maet hashtag for the results of the experiment!

Please feel free to share your best practice examples or advice below – over 100 students are expected to participate in the session.  I hope some of the participants will comment here tomorrow and I hope others in my PLN can add to the conversation!