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Teaching with Technology Week 5
Th is week we learned about the importance of reinforcing effort, students need to understand that the number one factor that affects their achievements is the effort they give to understanding the concept, projects or assignments. We as teachers should utilize technology tools such as Microsoft Excel to create spreadsheets and graphs that will allow students to see the correlation between their efforts and their achievements or grades. First, a teacher should create or find in the internet an Effort Rubric which will help students understand what categories and levels of accomplishments the teacher will be grading them on based on the effort they demonstrate in a weekly bases. For example, the categories teacher will have in the rubric may be participation, attention, homework, and studying among others. The levels for each category could be proficient, meet standards, emerging, and not acceptable, each level would be clearly described to the in each category. The teacher will present and explain the rubrics to the students and provide them with their own copies of the rubrics. The students will in turn use the rubrics to rate their own performance weekly based on this criteria. Then the teacher will help students create a chart using Microsoft Excel to track their effort and their corresponding grades on a weekly basis. Then with the information the students provide and their grades, the teacher will help students create a bar or column graph demonstrating the relationship between the students' efforts and their grades. Helping students understand the relationship between effort and achievement. I feel this was a very interesting topic and felt that it would be a great project to implement with my students. We also learned about the importance of authentic assessments and how Web 2.0 tools can be utilized to create authentic formative assessments to evaluate student progress through a unit of study. Harry Tuttle an expert in using technology to authentically evaluate student progress gave a number of examples of how to incorporate Web 2.o tools such as podcasts, videoconferencing, social bookmarks, electronic portfolios, and several others. Teachers must collaborate with each other to create instruction and evaluations throughout the unit by utilizing these technology tools. We learned how electronic portfolios have changed when comparing them in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, for example in Web 1.0 electronic portfolios produced traditional Web pages, compared to electronic portfolios through Web 2.0 create Web pages that are much more interactive and resemble desktop applications. Other important differences in the comparison include electronic portfolios in Web 1.0 are data-driven, focus on standardization, and are web based forms, while in Web 2.0 they are learner-driven, focus on creativity, and are formed mainly as blogs or Wikis. These differences can have a major change mainly because of the interaction that can occur in the assessment of learning.