{"id":48,"date":"2015-04-17T00:50:58","date_gmt":"2015-04-17T00:50:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/edhitchcock\/?p=48"},"modified":"2015-04-22T21:00:15","modified_gmt":"2015-04-22T21:00:15","slug":"chewing-and-chewing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/edhitchcock\/2015\/04\/17\/chewing-and-chewing\/","title":{"rendered":"Chewing and chewing…"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was little – which I know is hard to ever picture – I was told never to bite off more than I can chew. Probably sage advice, but rather than be overly cautious, I followed the letter of the law – rather than the spirit – and learned to chew more, rather than bite less.<\/p>\n

When I was in university, I had a lab report to write on the comparative musculature of mammal and reptile jaws. While the lab itself was fun, the report was rather dry, so I needed something to make it more interesting – mostly for me, but I figured the TA would appreciate it as well. So I spent three times as long as I needed to in order to create diagrams that were layered on acetate, so they could be pealed away like an actual dissection. It was fun, I felt creative and proud of my work, and it was a hit with the TA. Later, as a TA myself in the same lab, I showed it to a colleague – a prof at Vanier College – \u00a0who borrowed it, and used it as an exemplar in in his class for two decades.<\/p>\n

Because I learned to chew more.<\/p>\n

The strange irony I had discovered was that it can sometimes be easier to do more<\/em> work – because it is easier to do work that is rewarding.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to Cohort 21…<\/p>\n

My question revolved around making assessment meaningful, and I moved toward adopting a standards\/skills based grading\u00a0(SBG) approach, as I described previously in this video:<\/p>\n

[youtube]https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=G587eEZjRJA[\/youtube]<\/p>\n

But the issue became one of how to manage<\/em> all the data – how to keep track of all the individual skills for each student. Since I am quite familiar with building database applications in Access, I went that route. I created a set of forms for entering assessments and skills, and reports for showing progress, which look something like this:<\/p>\n

\"sbgreport\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Since the whole point is that students should know exactly where they need to improve, I make these forms available by email, and reprint whenever a test or major assessment is completed. But the emailing is time consuming, and the printing is a waste, ideally they should be able to see their progress at any time. There are several online SBG gradebooks available (ActiveGrade, JumpRope, BlueHarvest…), but none quite matched what I was looking for.<\/p>\n

You might guess where this is going.<\/p>\n

Biting off and chewing, remember?<\/p>\n

So for the past few weeks I’ve been teaching myself PHP, and developing a web-enabled version that currently works as a proof of concept on my machine, and will soon (hopefully)\u00a0migrate it to a server on the school network, and I already have plans for expanding the application to provide students with guidance on how to improve on\u00a0skills they are struggling with.<\/p>\n

This whole process has been one of learning (new techniques and tools), experimentation, iteration, consultation, and, of course, chewing what I bit off.<\/p>\n

Action Plan Presentation: https:\/\/docs.google.com\/presentation\/d\/1i0BkAUcP1NKUoKfp8YiT-iv_qeK7viRv9iwhHVHI1NU\/edit?usp=sharing<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was little – which I know is hard to ever picture – I was told never to bite off more than I can chew. Probably sage advice, but rather than be overly cautious, I followed the letter of the law – rather than the spirit – and learned to chew more, rather than … Continue reading “Chewing and chewing…”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-action-plan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/edhitchcock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/edhitchcock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/edhitchcock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/edhitchcock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/edhitchcock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/edhitchcock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/edhitchcock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/edhitchcock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/edhitchcock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}