Post #4: Concerns regarding assessment

One of my concerns regarding assessment is directly related to Problem Based Learning. When a course is all structured in PBL, students have many activities and sometimes there are multiple projects going on at the same time. On that notice, creating rubrics, providing feedback, assessing students and grading might become a nightmare. In fact, that is something I have been struggling with on the classes I am teaching. Since they have many projects with different levels of complexity, I also have to provide feedback and grade them.
These are the strategies I have created so far:
 At the beginning of projects I ask students to not only explore the topic of their projects, but also to find an article on the same topic, read it and summarize it making connections between their ideas and the scholarly piece of writing. That way I can keep track of what everyone is about to work on and maybe interfere here and there making suggestions.
In order to provide formative feedback on the ongoing projects, I created "networking days". On those days students either present their projects to the whole class or in small groups and they receive feedback on their projects. That allows me not only to provide students with formative feedback during class time, but it also allows other students to see different ideas and maybe have new insights on their own projects.
Finally, the most challenging for me is to grade and provide summative assessment. At that stage all the activity relies exclusively on me and, as any other graduate student who also happens to be a teaching assistant, I am always very busy. Thus, I am still struggling to create a strategy or a model of rubric that allows me to grade faster, as well as provide a rationale for students' grades. If anyone has a suggestion on that and would like to share with me I would appreciate it. For now, I am slowly grading my students' projects and I am struggling to keep all up to date. My plan, however, is to let them know about their grades for all the activities so far during midterm week since we do not have a specific activity for a midterm grade.

Post #3: Project Based Learning

This week’s readings allowed me to consolidate my personal and professional beliefs as a student and instructor about Project Based Learning as a catalyst towards fostering students’ motivation, creating a liberating and meaningful learning environment, allowing collaborative work, offering enough time for the incubation of powerful ideas, and engaging students in the construction of a product or artifact.

As a student, I had this experience in the Fall of 2011 in a course called Teaching with Technology, which happens to be the same course I am teaching now. As a student I could develop a website with teaching resources to integrate cultural artifacts in classes of English as a foreign language. Besides working on something I was passionate about and that was directly related to my TESOL major, I felt throughout different tasks and activities (such as Stop Animation video, 20% Project, and so on) that I was learning not only from the teacher, but also from exploring the world for resources (printed and online) and from interacting with peers in and out of class.

Now that I am a teaching assistant, I still believe on how powerful Project Based Learning is. In my class we are working on small-scale tasks that gradually prepare undergraduate students for a continuous, iterative and much more complex project called 20% Project. Despite the fact that I only introduced the 20% Project a couple of weeks ago, students are already searching for articles and resources directly related to their ideas, asking for advice from me and soon they will be sharing their reflections on the ongoing process with peers in order to have feedback from them. Despite the early stage, I already feel students’ higher levels of motivation towards this project not only because it is of their interest, but because it allows them enough time to be creative, to generate ideas, to receive feedback and to engage in the actual hands-on task of constructing their artifact. Hopefully by the end of the semester I will be able to post some of the interesting topics they have been working on.

Blog post #2: LoTi framework

The course I have been teaching is called EDIT 2000: Teaching with Technology and it is my first time teaching this class, it is my first time teaching in the United States and it is my first time teaching higher education level courses. Besides that, I am an international student. Despite all the challenges, I am very thankful for teaching two sections of that course. It has been a great learning experience. The purpose of that class is to teach pre-service teachers to use and manage technology in educational settings and to communicate means for using technology in educational settings.

Throughout the course, the instructor and students engage in numerous activities with various technologies that comply with the National Educational Technology Standards (Creativity and Innovation, Communication and Collaboration, Research and Information Fluency, Critical thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making, Digital Citizenship, Technology Operations and Concepts). As for the LoTi framework level, despite the variability of activities developed in and out of the classroom, I would say they evolve around Level 4b. In general, students are always engaged in activities that simulate real-world educational situations and they always have to "solve a problem" of how to implement a tool in education. For instance, students were asked to think from the perspective of a K12 teacher and design an animation video to teach those students some skill, to provide them further information on a topic discussed in class or even to help them evaluate a situation. Students had to conceive a realistic plot for the video based on a problem, design and develop the video itself and think of an application, that is summarized in a short paragraph.

For future improvement, I would ask students who engage in the video activity described above to collaborate in small groups towards the creation of a longer video, to synthesize the experience from a K12 teacher perspective (challenges, resources used) and to evaluate their final product and some of their classmates'. I believe that way students would achieve the Level 6 of the LoTi framework. Another example of activity that can be improved in the future is the use of the app iMovie. This semester students were asked to produce a movie trailer in small groups of 3 by using iPads and shooting around the College of Education building. Students were asked to be creative with regards to their movie trailer plots and to master the use of the app. Since this activity was not related to a real-world problem, in my opinion it can be classified as a Level 3. In order to enhance students' learning process, I would tell them to shoot a movie that is based on a specific case. In order words, students would think again from the perspective of the instructor, create a case-based learning activity that addresses an issue or a skill that is important for students and evaluate the final product as a learning object. I believe that would raise this activity up to Level 6.

Blog post #1: Technology integration into classroom

Students you will teach (and any of you born after 1980) are sometimes called “digital natives”, a phrase coined by Marc Prensky. Most of the teachers, however, are considered “digital immigrants”. It is not unusual to find resistance among teachers who have the challenge of learning new strategies to incorporate technology in the classroom and adjusting teaching methods and classroom environment to better support the learning process. Additionally, teachers have to use technology in a way to support the six main areas enlisted in the ISTE standards: Creativity and Innovation; Communication and Collaboration; Research and Information Fluency; Critical Thinking, Problem Solving and Desicion Making; Digital Citizenship and Technology Operations and Concepts.


My purpose on this blog is to reflect and refine my teaching experience as an international teaching assistant in an undergraduate-level course called EDIT 2000 (Teaching with Technology). On this course college students from the University of Georgia learn how to use and manage technology in educational settings (especially K12 settings) and to communicate means for using technology in educational settings. I hope to combine my ongoing teaching experience with the knowledge I gain from this class to build a stronger approach to technology integration into secondary education. Here you have a couple of videos I chose to illustrate examples of technology integration that are somewhat similar to what I am interested in