Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Student Surveys & the Upside-down Syllabus

Right away it should be known that credit for this post should be attributed to an idea that stems from a post & tweet read from Shelly Blake-Plock over at the excellent Teach Paperless blog. Here is the spark-point:

I'm making it a goal next year to not plan out my courses until I've first met my students. 

How many schools started this year with teachers walking through a syllabus while students feigned interest? More than this writer is comfortable with. So what was to be done? 

Today students reviewed a basic noun/verb/modifier summarization strategy and first applied it in a walkthrough with short, but fine TED talk by Richard St. John. Then came the real juice. For the last day of school all of my Honors English 9 students made short videos giving advice to their 2010-11 counterparts. While watching the video of their predecessors students then applied the aforementioned summarization strategy. After viewing students then entered their work into a combined interest inventory and summary sheet created in Google Docs

Tomorrow's work will take the results of this survey into the online tool Wallwisher. But first a bit of visualisation is needed. In a process outlined wonderfully over at Teacher Reboot Camp the results from the survey will become the basis of an interactive cloud via Tagul.

Here's one for the question "What nouns/things stood out to you from the video?"

 


This cloud is for the "Stand-out Verbs" question. 


 


The modifiers - 

 

With an interesting look at social media use to close: 






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