Creating a concept map

I am developing a course on environmental science. As part of my course, I will teach about population biology. Here is an outline of the topic taken from my course syllabus.

Population biology concepts

1. Population ecology

2. Carrying capacity

3. Reproductive strategies

4. Survivorship

• Mark and recapture lab: Something’s Fishy- Students will use beans to simulate wild animals.  They will sample tag a certain number of these animals, sample the animals, and use their samples to estimate the population.
• Estimating carrying capacity lab - Students will graph acorn yield for oak trees, determine the maximum acorn yield, and use this to calculate the potential carrying capacity for deer.

I created a quick concept map using bubbl.us.

To actually teach the unit online, I will utilize asynchronous tools including videos, reading assignments, and online simulation.  The students will also complete labs and simulations offline and submit documents such as lab reports for these assignments.  I will have a discussion board for students to post questions about topics and will give written feedback, audiofeedback, and links to additional sources on the topic.

Time management

As part of my Teacher Open Online Training, I read a number of links about time management.  The first thing I did was take a quiz on time management.  While I didn't feel that I was doing well on the quiz, I scored in the Using Time Effectively category.  I scored a 47 (at the bottom of the using time effectively, but still there).  I think I primarily scored there because of prioritizing and in spite of procrastinating.  I then browsed a number of tools for time management.

Time management tools

I did not find any of these tools to be helpful.  I don't wast time browsing social internet sites.  I don't like autocorrect, as it messes me up more than it helps.  I sure don't want an extended autocorrect.  Some of the tools could be useful, but I am more of an old school pen and paper kind of man.

So, here are five time management tools that I do find helpful.

One - make a list.  I do this with pen and paper.  Sometime I make a list of things to get done for the day, sometimes for the week, sometimes for a course or activity.  I like to actually write them down and put them in my pocket.  I enjoy the feeling of physically crossing things off my list.

Two - phone calendar.  I'm old school.  I don't have a smart phone.  There are two reasons that I don't.  One, I think it can sometimes be more of a distraction than a help.  The more important reason though is that I am cheap.  I do not want to pay extra fees to Verizon.  It is expensive enough as it is.  That said, I do have a cellphone.  It's an old style flip phone - the Boulder.

While it is an old flip phone, it actually does have most of the capabilities that people associate with smartphones without the distractions that come with touchscreens and touchscreen games.  One feature that I use all the time is my phone calendar.  I program in some regular events and add irregular events.  It notifies me on time and unlike a smart phone, my battery almost never goes dead.  Even after having had the phone for 6 years, I still only have to charge it once a week tops.

Three - While I may seem like a luddite, I am not.  I am not against technology if it can actually help me in life.  One tool that I have found helpful for teaching is Google Calendar.  I don't like it in my daily life.  I might like it if I had a smartphone that gave me notifications directly from Google Calendar, but I think this would be a distraction.  However, I upload my classroom lesson plans to Google Calendar.  I get notifications when I get on my computer at school, which is when and where I want them.

Four - Delicious.  While the social bookmarking site may not seem like a time management tool, it is.  It helps me keep important links organized.  This makes it easier for me to find important resources for my job.  Therefore, I wast less time.

Five - Bookmarks.  Yes, I know.  They are not new or glamorous.  However, for my work I have a desktop computer.  While social bookmarking is nice when traveling, most of the time I'm not traveling.  It's even quicker to find important resources using my desktop bookmarks than it is to take the time to login to Delicious.

The key thing to time management is setting priorities.  Tools however can be helpful.  Each person has to find what works for him.  These work for me.

Synchronous session

Online teaching is a great way to increase student access to education.  It allows students to have resources at their disposal almost anywhere at anytime.  However, there are certain limitations to online teaching and asynchronous learning.  Students need real help in real time.

Synchronous sessions allow students to have direct access to the teacher.  If the teacher uses synchronous methods with "face time", students and teachers can put a face with a name.  This humanizes the classroom.  It let's the students see the teacher as a person and the teacher see the students as people.

One on one synchronous sessions are the best for giving students feedback on progress and help on individual questions.  However, doing one on one sessions with numerous students is often impractical.

There are however many benefits to synchronous sessions as a class.  Students in a classroom session are more likely to talk to each other.  After reading the TOOL discussion of synchronous sessions, I am going to encourage students create and utilize breakout sessions.  I may even assign groups and give a follow up assignment to the discussion.  The students will then complete these assignments in a break out session.

Here is a bit more about synchronous sessions.

I am currently teaching an online course.  My class is small, and most of the students I have are at my school.  This allows me to see them in the day if I need to do so.  I have a few other students at other schools in my district.  I travel to see them face to face once a week.  Because of this, I haven not had to explore synchronous sessions as much as I would otherwise.  I have utilized Google Hangouts and Face Time with them, but I need to do more with synchronous sessions.  This will be even more important if I teach students that are more removed from me.

Discussions

In a traditional classroom, teachers and students meet face to face.  In this setting, students and teachers can have meaningful real time discussions of subjects.  Teachers can hear (and sometime see) what students are thinking.  Teachers can then prompt the students to think deeper by asking follow up questions.  Students can also talk to each other.  This allows students to learn from each other and to hear from other perspectives.  While this is happening, the teacher can interject to keep students on task or prompt them to go a different direction with discussions.  It is much more difficult to have such discussions in an online classroom.

One way to approximate such discussions is through the use of 'discussion forums'.  Georgia TOOL suggests these best practices for using discussion forums.

• Respond to the first thread of all student responses and ensure that the post addresses the essential elements
• Highlight selections from the prompt, reading, or thematic focus of the student’s response in the initial feedback
• Integrate audio commentary in the response
• Link to external resources, readings, or websites for further study
• Rely on the Socratic Method in all Discussion Forums

I like the first suggestion.  By responding to the first thread of all student responses, the teacher shows that he is monitoring responses.  Moreover, if he does so quickly he can complement the student for having all the essential elements or prompt him for missing elements.  Not only should this get the first student on track, but it should get all the rest on track.

Likewise, highlighting selections from the prompt or focus in the students response helps ensure that the the students are getting the essence of the question.

Before I did the last section on TOOL, audio commentary had not even been a thought for me.  However, I liked the idea and recently started using it.  I think that Soundcloud makes it as simple as anything out there.  At any rate, I like the idea of using voice commentary to the students.  It grabs their attention and lets me say more in less time.  It is easier for students and for me, the teacher.

The fourth idea - link to external resources - is a great idea and one that I don't do enough.  The teacher can link outside resources for remediation or extension.  It is an easy way to give constructive feedback.

I somewhat disagree with the last suggestion for best practice.  I do like the Socratic Method and think that it should be often used.  This helps ensure that students have to think for themselves, but allows the teacher to guide the students by questioning.  However, I think that there are times that the teacher can and should be more direct.

For my online class, I use Moodle as my LMS.  It has lots of neat features for discussion forums.  One that I particularly like makes students submit a response before they can see others responses.  I like this because all too often, students merely copy one another.  By using this option, the student has to think to formulate his reply and can then see if others agree with his reply or if they took a completely different approach.

Digital feedback

As part of my Georgia Teacher Open Online training, I had to explore different methods of giving digital feedback.  The training gave several suggestions for digital feedback:

• linking to outside resources
• leaving an audio recording
• images for an excellent job
• recording from synchronous sessions
• videos

I  have already been using outside resources and videos with my online class.  I don't use them as immediate feedback often enough though, and this was a good reminder to do so.

Images for an excellent job actually seem a childish to me.  I think it can be a fine thing, but it is not my thing.

The suggestion that struck me though was giving online students feedback through an audio recording rather than through written feedback.  There is something powerful about the human voice, and in many cases it is actually easier to record the feedback than to write.

So, after having read through the material on the TOOL website, I thought I'd check it out. I had assignment my students to make a Prezi on food webs.  I thought that audio would be an easy way to give specific feedback on this assignment.   I tried the Evernote site suggested by TOOL, but didn't really like it.  So instead, I went to online-voice-recorder.com.  I found this site easier to use.  I uploaded my file to Soundcloud.  In hindsight, I might have just used Soundcloud to record it.  Anyhow, here is an example.

Anyhow, here is a file giving feedback on the assignment.

Sample Audio Feedback 


I mentioned other ways to give specific feedback above, but I wanted to give one example of one I actually used.

Feedback

Part of the Georgia Performance Standards for Environmental Science are listed below.

Students will investigate the flow of energy and cycling of matter within an ecosystem and relate these phenomena to human society.
b. Relate energy changes to food chains, food webs, and to trophic levels in a generalized ecosystem, recognizing that entropy is a primary factor in the loss of usable food energy during movement up the trophic levels.
c. Relate food production and quality of nutrition to population growth and the trophic levels.
d. Relate the cycling of matter and the flow of energy to the Laws of Conservation of matter and energy. Identify the role and importance of decomposers in the recycling process.

To assess students over these standards, they will complete the following assignment.

Students will create a Prezi presentation showing three different food chains in the local ecosystem and a food web showing how the food chains are interconnected.  Then the students will answer the following questions.

1. As you go up a food chain, what happens to the amount of energy available for use?  Explain why this is in using the laws of thermodynamics.

2. As human population grows, the world will need more food to provide nutrition for the growing population.  Explain how people may be able to meet the nutritional demands of the future by changing the trophic level of humans.

3. What role do decomposers play in your food chain or food web?

I developed a quick rubric for scoring the assignment using Anneberg Learner Rubric Builder.

Rubric

 Again, I am amazed at how remarkably well the general criteria fit my specific assignment.  I could use this rubric to grade the assignment as is.  However, for the students to get the fullest from my feedback, I'd have to make personal comments to go along with the rubric.

Lets say a student completed the assignment, made his Prezi, and answered his questions in complete sentences in paragraph format.  But let's say that his food chains only had three levels each and when made into a food web, there were only one or two connections between food chains.  He answered question one by saying "The amount of energy available for use as you go up trophic levels goes down," but he goes no further.  He answered question two by saying "In the future people can eat less."  He answered question three, "Decomposers break down dead material and return nutrients to a usable form in soil or air."

For format, I'd score him strong - a 4.  He completed a Prezi, made his food chains and food web, and answered the questions in complete sentences.

For organization, I'd score him basic - a 2.  If I just sent him that though, he'd not know what he failed to do.  So I'd send him personal feedback something like this.

"You connected the ideas of food chains to food webs.  However, by limiting your food chains to only three levels, you fail to grasp the complexity of food chains and food webs.  Such a short food chain led to few connections within your food web.  Thus, it appears that food webs and food chains are only partly connected when in fact their are many, complex connections between the two.  Moreover, your answers the the questions are at best, partly correct.  They are often incomplete.  For example, you correctly state that energy for use goes down as you go up tropic levels but you did not explain "why" using the laws of thermodynamics.

On content, I'd again score him a 2 - basic.  I'd point out that he did the minimum to meet the assignment by completing three food chains but the food chains really weren't complete as many links were left out of the chain.  Showing only three trophic levels skips many levels of consumers.

On details, I'd score him weak - a 1.  I'd again point out the lack of depth in his food chains and food webs.  I'd point out the incompleteness of his answers to the questions.  I would however give a little praise for encouragement by telling him that his answer to question three shows a better depth of knowledge, but I'd leave him with a question.  "What do decomposers have to do with energy transfer?"

Rubrics

This assignment was about developing rubrics for online grading.

I was worried about this as an assignment because as a rule, I hate rubrics.  I even hate the word rubric.  I had never heard this word until I took my first education class, and I felt even then that it was a made up word.  I now know it comes from the terms for burnt ocher which was used to gloss old manuscripts.  Thus, a rubric was a commentary on old manuscripts and a rubric for grading is a commentary on student work.  Knowing that the word wasn't purely educational jargon put me somewhat at ease with rubrics, but I still didn't like them.

Even in my traditional classroom, I almost never grade by rubrics.  However, I have been teaching AP classes for several years and the "Scoring Guidelines" that they give for free response problems have put me even more at ease with rubrics.  This may just be because I prefer the more descriptive "Scoring Guidelines" to the jargon of "Rubric."  At any rate, I was not looking forward to the assignment.

Since I had to make a rubric for this assignment, I decided to do so for an assignment that I recently gave students for my online environmental science class.  Here is the assignment I gave my students.

You will use Prezi to make a presentation.  In your presentation, you will show and describe three food chains from the temperate deciduous forest (We live in a temperate deciduous forest).  Be sure to include producers, consumers, and decomposers in each food chain.  You will then show how these food chains combine to make a food web.

To make my Rubric, I chose to use the easy rubric maker from Annenberg Learner.  I chose it because it sounded easy and because I have used Annenberg Learner for many teaching activities in my classes and I trust the site.  The rubric maker was really easy.  I chose the categories to be graded from a list and clicked create.  Here is the rubric it made for me.

For being a general rubric generator, I was really impressed at how well the descriptions fit my assignment.  To use it for full effect though, I'd have to add a bit of description to the rubric.  Let me just use the "Organization" section of the Annenberg Learner generated rubric as an example.

4 Logical presentation of ideas; all parts contribute to a strong central idea.
3 Most ideas are connected; some parts don't contribute to the central idea.
2 Selects correct format for the assignment but uses it inconsistently with many errors.
1 Ideas have little connection to each other; there is no strong central idea.

This can be tweaked very simply.

4 Logical presentation of food chains and food webs shows a food web is composed of many interconnected food chains
3 The idea of food chains is connected to food webs but the idea that a food chain is but one path in a food web is not clearly established.
2 Correct format for food chain and food web presentation but the logical connection between food chains and food webs is not drawn or not made explicit.
1 Food chains and a food web are presented but not connected under a central idea.

I really like the simplicity of the Annenberg Learner Rubric maker.


my students.

Utilizing one of the resources discussed above, create a rubric that integrates specific criteria for an assignment and also affords the instructor ample commentary on the student’s product. Make the rubric available in a post in your blog.

After completing a blog post that meets the requirements of this quest, submit the link to your post in the Submission Form at the bottom of this page.