February 7, 2012

More on Open Computer Testing at St. Greg’s: Theater History Class, Guest Post by Lisa Bodden

Posted by Jonathan Martin under Uncategorized | Tags: , , |
[3] Comments 

As part of a continuing exploration here, I am happy to share this next example of and reflection upon “Open Computer” or “Open Internet” Testing at St. Gregory.  As I’ve written before, I think this assessment approach is a highly valuable one for promoting deeper learning, information literacy, and analytic and organizational skill development over memorization and regurgitation.  I think that many tests in most subjects can be, with the right intentional design, “open internet” and that they will be the better for it. 

Some argue against tests altogether, but I still love a good test, and taking the time to think through as a teacher what kind of questions can we ask which will continue to be meaningful assessments when Google and Wolfram Alpha are available is, I think, a highly productive exercise, and, of course, will generate a more authentic assessment experience far more well aligned with the real world of professionals for which we are preparing our students. 

Below is a report about another experiment with this approach from our Theater teacher and director, Lisa Bodden.

Comparing my approach to teaching this course with the last time I taught a similar version I realized that the major thing that has changed is the student’s access to technology. Did I still need the students to buy a heavy, although comprehensive, textbook? No, the information is available at their fingertips.

Did I need to order lengthy videos describing very limited topics and spend time plucking out the important details? No, YouTube is almost too easy and has a plethora of informative  videos, performances, and interviews with scholars and professionals.

Therefore, did I really need the students to regurgitate information or could I ask them to utilize  Internet resources and their class notes to compose essays based on questions that they helped craft?

The “answers” the students created in response to the essay prompts not only proved to me how well they understood the information, but also allowed them to maintain their individuality, voice, and opinion. I asked for historically specific information, but they could choose who and what on which to focus. The test went very well, in my view, and I will happily turn to this method again and again. Although this will not be my only method of assessment, I consider it a success. (more…)

 

January 19, 2012

PBL projects at St. Greg’s: 9th grade Bioethics project final presentations

Posted by Jonathan Martin under Uncategorized | Tags: , , |
1 Comment 

In what has been one of the most exciting curricular developments of late at St. Gregory, our ninth graders are tackling each winter an elaborate multi-disciplinary project on the topic of bioethics. The assignment comes jointly from the ninth grade biology and English teachers, and requires students in teams to research an assigned topic in bioethics, address driving questions, take it through multiple steps of revision and reflection, and then publish their completed work in a presentation which they deliver to other students, after which they actually provide a test-for-understanding quiz to those students about their presentation.

Below these four presentation Prezis and video (two prezis after the jump (more), which I am so happy to be sharing, is more detailed information about the assignment, including a rubric and the project “pitch” requirements. (You may need to click on “more.”) I thank the St. Gregory students whose fine work this is for giving me permission to share.

—


—
Here is a link to the test for understanding quiz which was prepared to accompany this presentation, designed by the students as part of their project. (it is amusing to me to read question 4, multiple choice option b). (more…)

 

January 5, 2012

Design Build Tech Innovation Class Projects, Part 3: Solar Energy- Laptop Recharging Station Ramada and Solar Oven

Posted by Jonathan Martin under Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , |
Leave a Comment 

(This is the third post in a series; be sure to read the first for context).

This Class project was a year in the making: It began last spring, and I posted then about the class plans and my conversations with the working group as they “pitched it” to me and sought my approval and sponsorship. It is worth checking out this previous post to show the sequence, beginning with designing and planning and now culminating in completion:

Below are the student overview of the project’s purpose and procedure, and after the jump (more)  is the Solar Oven Project.

—

Purpose:  The purpose of this project was to provide the school’s students with an environmentally friendly way to charge their laptops.

Procedure 1. Screw wooden beams onto the preexisting structure. 2. Cut L-shaped metal to the correct length to fit the desired mounting angle of the panels and cut L-shaped metal to fit the length of the panel. 3. Attach the metal to the panel. 4. Attach the panel supports to the metal running the length of the panel. 5. Put the panel on the roof. 6. Attach the panel by screwing it to the structure. 7. Run conduit from the panels to the wall. 8. Drill a hole through the wall. 9. Run the wires from the panels through the hole. 10. Attach the panel wires to the charge controller. 11. Attach the charge controller to a car battery. 12. Attach the car battery to a power inverter. 13. Run a power cord from the inverter to a wall outlet outside. (more…)

 

January 4, 2012

Design Build Tech Innovations Class Projects. Part 2: LED Matrix and Music Streaming Program

Posted by Jonathan Martin under Uncategorized | Tags: , , , |
Leave a Comment 

See previous post for more information about the Design Build Tech Innovation Class. Reports written by students in the class.

Alex,  Nik and Michael: An LED matrix. 

8X8LEDMatrixThis project started with a 7 by 5 L.E.D Matrix found in the physics room. I then had the urge to get it working, so I started to test connections on the Matrix too see how the wiring was done.

I figured out that the Matrix worked in a row column fashion which made it impossible to make any other letter than I or l. Then I told myself that if I switched rows and individual dots every millisecond, I could then make any letter, picture, shape, etc. I then started looking for the most practical programming chip, an Arduino.

After the large amount of wiring I started programming. My first program consisted of turning on and of lights very quickly, which is simply but requires about 150 line of code. After completing one letter, “N”, everybody realized that this thing was freaking awsome! So everybody started to get involved (mostly Alex). (more…)

 

January 4, 2012

Design Build Tech Innovations Class Work, Part 1: Hexapod, Rockets, and Trebuchet

Posted by Jonathan Martin under Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , |
Leave a Comment 

I’ve been writing recently about FabLabs (here and here), and the importance of providing times, ways, and places for students to design and build their own “solutions” to problems, especially problems they discover, and to refine those “solutions” in multiple iterations.

(Be sure to see the two other posts sharing class work also: here and here).

At St. Gregory, where we aspire to “create innovators,” one of our most important and most exciting initiatives over the past two years has been the steady advance of our “Design Build”  Tech Innovations class,  taught by the amazing and awesome Mr. Dennis Conner.   It is an entirely PBL formatted class, with no set curriculum other than having students investigate “problems” and choose one to design and build solutions for.

The class continues to be a great success, and the difficult question looming for us at St. Gregory is whether to decide to move it from an optional elective (it is taught pass-fail, students can take it as many times as they wish, and it has received great enthusiasm from its participants) to a required freshman or sophomore class, formatted as an “introduction to and foundations of innovation” class.     The jury is still out on this one.

Suzie Boss, an edutopia blogger and author of Reinventing Project Based Learning with Technology, and  who visited St. Gregory last spring for two days, wrote this recently, in a piece entitled “How Design Build Curriculum Can Transform a Community.”

Where does a project like this fit into current discussions of 21st-century skills?

Our students are learning skills like welding and carpentry, 2D and 3D modeling. But those are the vehicles to do something else. We blog as much as we’re on the table saw. We’re giving them tools for entrepreneurship, for innovation, for local citizenship and engagement. We’re giving them a way to think through problems in their own lives. Design is all about possibility. For a student, that’s the best gift you can give them.

With the fall semester now completed, I want to share, in this post and in two following posts, examples of student work completed in the past few months by their own reports.  You can find the whole set on the class website here.

Spencer B’s project: a HEXAPOD

This is a hexapod. A hexapod is a robot with 6 ‘legs’, in this case with 3dof per leg. And before I bore you, I want to tell you that this is quite possibly the greatest project I have ever worked on. It has cost me, so far, just below 1k. Bit expensive, no? But the experience and result has been worth it. Intrigued?

This has been a labor of love. It’s been frustrating. It still won’t walk, this is because I had no idea about its power consumption. 8 amps? Despite that ridiculous number for a rather small robot, the control program (which consists of a virtual cube you can rotate with arrow keys and change with a few keystrokes) is nearly there! I’ll post it later on.

The robot was constructed primarily out of anodized aluminum parts and 18 servos. It includes a high amp regulator, as well as a microcontroller and a radio module. It looks like something out of a Sci-Fi movie. Here’s a link to where I got the parts:   WWW.LYNXMOTION.COM

—-

Clayton M’s project: Rockets!

—

Michael and others: the Trebuchet 2:

Filmed at our soccer field just behind our Science Laboratories, and also at a Trebuchet competition held in October on the campus of the University of Arizona, in which our students competed.

 

December 19, 2011

Open Computer Testing at St. Gregory: Chemistry Class with Scott Morris, including an Annotated Sample Exam

Posted by Jonathan Martin under Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , |
[4] Comments 

—

As I wrote about last year, I am greatly enthusiastic about the opportunity Open Computer testing plays in assessing our students in their development of 21st century skills.     I think it is a really exciting way to take assessment into 21st century information environments, and to situate students in much more real-world situations as we prepare them for the contemporary world of work.

The above slideshow displays what I think is a very well designed “Open computer/open internet” exam, and Dr. Scott Morris has added on every slide his annotations of how he expects students to use the internet in answering these questions, and how these questions, with those resources, demand more of his students, particularly the higher order thinking skills of critical thinking and analytic reasoning, and a deeper understanding of the course material. (If the slides are too small for the print to be legible, click on the full screen link at the bottom right).

As I frequently discuss with Dr. Morris, with whom I have prepared this post and with whom I am co-presenting on this topic at the NAIS Annual Conference in March, our rationale is that our students are preparing to work in professional environments where they must tackle and resolve complex problems, and we know that in nearly every envisionable such environment, they will have laptops or other mobile, web-connected, digital tools to address those problems.   Let’s assess their  understanding in situations parallel to those for which we are preparing them.

But it is not just a matter of situating them in real-world environments, but that with open computer testing, the format of exams, (and yes, as much as I am a huge fan of PBL, exhibitions, and portfolios, call me retrograde but I still think there is a place and a role for exams in the range of assessment tools we use,) but the format of exams changes in really meaningful ways. (more…)

 

December 14, 2011

Advisory at St. Gregory: A Student Journalism Perspective, from the Gregorian Chant

Posted by Jonathan Martin under Uncategorized | Tags: , |
Leave a Comment 

A few times a year I enjoy sharing here on the blog student perspectives about our educational programs and initiatives here at St. Gregory, lifting them from our award winning student newspaper, the Gregorian Chant. 

Although I write more often here about our 1:1 laptop and related technology initiatives, our leadership and innovation educational advances, and our enhanced attention to 21st century skills, our new faculty-student “advisory” is certainly one of our very most important enterprises of the past two years.   Before last fall (2010), the school functioned with only a small “homeroom” arrangement, but now students and teachers meet twice weekly for 20 minutes for what we intend to be a rich, relationship-building, social and reflective, service-oriented, character enhancing, advisory time.  

In the most recent student paper, one of our sophomore students, Leah M., reported on the program in what is now its second year.  I am delighted by the report, and am happy to share it here.

—-

STG advisory making progress toward goals

There is one “class” at St. Gregory where students are not only permitted, but also encouraged, to relax, kick back, chat with friends, and reflect.  The implementation of advisory has opened the door to a learning experience that is free from pressure and evaluation.  Let’s see how advisories are doing, what positives they have brought to our school, and what might still need tweaking.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays of every week, students from each grade meet with one another and one or two faculty members to participate in advisory.  Advisory did exist years ago at St. Gregory in a different form, primarily for the purpose of beginning the day and taking attendance, and it eventually morphed into homeroom.  Advisory at St. Gregory began anew last year with a transformed agenda, and is continuing through this 2011-2012 school year.  Some of the goals set forth by the administration when advisory began were to have a forum in which students could comfortably articulate their feelings and get feedback from peers and teachers, to encourage students to improve stress management skills, to allow students to work towards better communication with others, and to serve generally as a support system.

When asked if she was pleased with the progress of advisory, Ms. Heintz replied that she is “happy with the direction it is going,” although she admitted that it has not yet met the administration’s expectations.  Ms. Heintz added that she believes “it can mean more to the students over time and be a better resource.”  However, this does not mean that advisory has not evolved and changed since the launch of it last year.  The faculty listened to complaints and opinions about the initial practice of every advisory discussing the same topic once a week, and has instead moved towards having each advisory take charge of its own time.  Along with this alteration, this year there has also been more sibling advisory interaction. (more…)

 

November 28, 2011

Presidential campaign 2016: Student videos and websites for Senior Politics class

Posted by Jonathan Martin under Uncategorized | Tags: , , , |
1 Comment 

Some of my favorite elements of excellent learning are:

  • engaging students in making connections from their learning to “real world” issues and concerns;
  • motivating and rewarding students by asking them to do work that matters to them personally and which they can invest themselves into, developing as they do a stronger sense of their own identity and their own unique worldview;
  • asking students to use, develop, and demonstrate outstanding 21st century skills and digital proficiencies, and in particular using effective digital communication tools such as websites and digital videos;
  • and asking, expecting, and even insisting that students prepare and present high quality, finished, polished “products” as culminations of their learning experiences, and use these finished products as goals and ends toward which their learning journeys are progressing.

—

In a recent extended assignment for our excellent History and Social Studies teacher and department Chair, Michelle Berry, Ph.D., students were asked to prepare 2016 Presidential campaigns, including campaign ads on digital video and full blown websites.

Here I am sharing three video advertisement examples, and two websites.   The first comes from student Jackson R., who prepared a Green Party Presidential campaign with himself playing the part of Robert Forrest.   Be sure to click on the image above to visit his extraordinarily comprehensive and near-professionally produced campaign website, and enjoy his campaign ad video.  (more…)

 

November 18, 2011

Assessment for Learning, not Assessment of Learning: MAP testing at St. Gregory

Posted by Jonathan Martin under Uncategorized | Tags: , , , |
[2] Comments 

I spent most of the day yesterday working with our fine Middle school head, Heather Faircloth, preparing the presentation above for last evening’s program about our use of MAP, the Measures of Academic Progress.  This is the tool we use for standardized testing, and which we are administering three times a year to our students in grades six, seven, and eight.

Often I write about our work to enrich our students with leadership and innovation education, our focus on higher order thinking skills, our advisory programs, project-based learning, and academic extracurriculars.  But we never forget that all of this stands upon the bedrock of a very serious and strong foundation of core academic skills, the skills assessed in the MAP testing.

Until very recently here, standardized testing was administered only one time a year, in a one-size-fits all, uniform, paper and pencil, bubble test, the results of which came only months later and which were promptly filed, with only a very little amount of attention given to them, and even at that, very few resources available to make a good use of the results.  As Mrs. Faircloth explained last night, and as you can see in the above,  our use of MAP is different in nearly every way from the previous practice.

MAP is administered three times a year with results received nearly immediately; over the course of nine test segments, it creates a motion picture of a student’s learning in progress, rather than a static snapshot once a year.  It is a computer-adaptive assessment, meaning it quickly conforms itself to the student’s individual learning level, and then gives a far closer and clearer view of that student’s individual proficiencies and areas of proximate growth, things which are unique to every students. (more…)

 

November 2, 2011

Advisory Program: Vehicles for service learning, problem-solving, diversity education

Posted by Jonathan Martin under Uncategorized | Tags: , |
1 Comment 

We are now in year two at St. Gregory of our advisory program revival, and great things are happening to carry it forward.

In our first year, we took an approach whereby we’d provide for one of each week’s two advisory sessions an advisory curriculum unit for each teacher-adviser to use in that “all-school advisory” session, so we could better advance our character education mission and coordinate across the school a unified program.   It sounded like a good idea, but it wasn’t.   Simply put, it was hard to deploy a single curriculum that each and every teacher could and would effectively and happily put in place, and the feedback we received was not very positive.

This year, we regrouped and are offering instead a wide variety of challenges, competitions, suggestions, and invitations to advisory groups, each of them allowing for more choice, more variety, and more adaptability to the needs and wishes of each group individually.

Three of the areas we are focusing on in this approach are service learning, creative and collaborative problem-solving, and character education, and I want to share an example of each.

For service learning, Lorie Heald our service coordinator has been working with our development office, including director Rachel Villarreal and our AmeriCorps community outreach coordinator, Amy Blankenship, to encourage and motivate students to adopt a local cause or community charity and then, as an advisory group, work together to plan an activity or series of activities to address these needs.  From Ms. Heald:

As part of our theme “One School, One City” I would like to invite you to consider starting an advisory community service project.  It is my hope that this year-long project will provide an opportunity for your students to work on a project together, allow your parents to get involved, and perhaps give your advisory a deeper purpose and direction.  (more…)

 

November 1, 2011

Leadership education, Independent School Magazine, and St. Greg’s

Posted by Jonathan Martin under Uncategorized | Tags: , |
1 Comment 

The current issue of the NAIS (National Association of Independent Schools) magazine, Independent School, is entitled “Evolution or Revolution: The Pace of Change in our Schools.”   It is a terrific issue, and has many great pieces, several of which I intend to write about in future posts.    (read to bottom (more) to see the section of this issue highlighting our own work at St. Gregory). 

One especially interesting article, both in general and to us at St. Gregory, is by Ted Fish, calling for “Teaching Leadership to All: The Educational Challenge of our Times.“

At no other point in our history have the choices we’ve made had the potential to create such a deep and lasting imprint upon so many others, or cause so much harm. In such a world, developing good leaders has never mattered more.

Ted has a stake in this enterprise, as he is the executive director of Gardner Carney Leadership Institute, which teaches teachers to teach leadership.   In the piece, he sets out a useful, interesting set of strands for guiding the development of leadership learning in K-12 learning.

These three strands define a simple map for how we can teach leadership in our schools:

  • Leadership is concerned with taking courageous action, so students need practice taking risks and making mistakes.
  • Leadership is tied to caring and the betterment of others, so students need practice understanding the emotions of others and developing empathy. (more…)
 

October 28, 2011

The Continuing Conversation: our new Faculty Growth and Evaluation process, with a priority on Goals, Growth, Connectedness and Accountability

Posted by Jonathan Martin under Uncategorized | Tags: , , |
[4] Comments 

NOTE:  For 2011-2012 the goals deadline is November 1.

Last winter we began a conversation in our Academic Committee about revising the long-standing process of faculty evaluation at St. Gregory.   There was strong interest in this revision coming from our teachers and our department chairs, and in April we made a commitment as a Committee to revamp our process.

A subgroup of the Academic Committee met in May, including department chairs, administrators, and myself, and identified some of our key concerns about the then-current process, and goals for the revision.   It was an odd time of year to start the conversation, as school was concluding for the year and summer broke thereafter, but it did work to stimulate valuable mulling for all of us over the course of those several hot months.

Our shared perception about the then-in-place process was that it was too infrequent (only every four years) for feedback, support, growth or accountability, and that it was too bureaucratic, too paper-intensive, too much a matter of jumping through hoops or checking off a checklis of required syllabi, assignments, papers graded, etc.

Our goals then, as they emerged through our discussion, became increasingly clear: a more frequent and timely process that emphasized goal-setting and growth but still ensured accountability for teaching and learning effectiveness and desired outcomes, and which minimized paperwork and other bureaucratic elements while promoting greater connectedness, communication, and transparency. (more…)

 

Next Page »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 2,616 other followers