[IAEP] Pedagogical Vision for the Journal was GPA Report - Feedback on using the Journal

[Caroline Meeks]

>
>
> >       • The word "Description" is not very friendly. I like "What did you
>> > do?" Walter wants to expand it even further, I'm not sure about
>> > that, its pretty challenging for the students to type so I'm not
>> > sure we want more boxes.
>>
>> No comment, I don't like this whole dialogue to be honest (it breaks
>> my working flow and distracts me from whatever I'm trying to achieve),
>> but I'm not a pedagogic type so don't feel I have a say in this
>> design. I get the impression most (adults and kids) will just skip
>> past this dialogue anyway give half a chance. There's been some noises
>> to remove this dialogue completely, or at least let folks easily
>> disable it from within Sugar.
>>
>
> It breaks my workflow too, although a Discard button would make it better.
>  And I like the concept of forcing people to name their work; as a
> developer, I'm just usually testing something instead of "creating work".
>


We are getting very enthusiastic responses to Sugar as an ePortfolio
creation tool.  No one likes standardized tests. Portfolios represent a far
better alternative for assessing student progress.  If we can create a good
system for creating and managing them we will have contributed a great deal.
We are working with one of the experts in the field, Evangeline Harris
Stefanakis an author and professor at BU.

Believe me, these kids did not want to write anything in that dialog box
either! But by doing so they 1. Reflected and thus helped process and keep
their learning, 2. Practiced much needed writing skills. 3. Created an item
they can put into a longer term reflective portfolio.  4. Helped others see
their level of understanding of the material they were working on.

Students spend only 30% of their time in school.  Even within a school they
see many different adults, teachers, assistant teachers, specialists.  After
school care and parents and others at home are also very important for
student learning.  Our vision is that the Journal helps all the adults the
student interacts with see what they are working on and where they are in
their learning and lets them interact with each other around the students'
work.

My current vision is that teachers would tag items with "parent" and the
parents would learn how to search the Journal for these tags and to tag
items with "teacher" or something similar if they want to send a comment
back to the teacher.  I'm still pretty hazy on exactly how this should work
but that is my general thought.



>
> Best,
> Wade
>



-- 
Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove
Caroline at SolutionGrove.com

617-500-3488 - Office
505-213-3268 - Fax
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