This Weekly Project Planner GDocs template can be used in F2F and Online courses to scaffold student organization and planning as well as serve as a formative assessment tool.
Like a bazillion other people last week, I participated in a Zoom meeting with my work colleagues. It went fine, even for the less tech savvy in our crowd. WHY HAVEN’T WE BEEN DOING THIS FOR YEARS? As a result, I plan to cut the number of actual F2F meetings I attend from here on out in half. There is no reason to try to find a physical space and common time between a decent number of people when we can just Zoom. If some people want to meet together, so be it. But requiring physical bodies in physical spaces at the same time for routine informational meetings has always seemed ridiculous to me, even more so since the COVID-19 cultural event.
I have really digressed from my reason for writing with that rant, but I feel better and I think I’m ready to roll now.
One thing I noticed as a reoccurring theme in my department meeting last week was faculty who were struggling to know how they could keep students moving on larger class projects with no physical presence to check in, assess how students were progressing with their work and provide feedback. While this is certainly a difficult task to manage with 100+ college students when you see them a few times a week, it seemed to be a challenge many of my colleagues were facing and concerned about in our rapid transition to online learning.
e-Books will likely be a part of future early childhood classrooms, and in light of the thin evidence base on their role in curriculum and instruction, we undertook a formative study to investigate what e-book pedagogy for early literacy might look like in the early childhood classroom [1]. We approached our research from a design perspective—much like an engineer—creating a prototype model for implementation in the classroom and testing it to begin a winnowing process that informs the educational design (e-books in preschool for purposes of early literacy instruction) and identifies design features that are feasible and preferable in an instructional model [2, 3].
At this early stage of prototype creation, we conceptualized an e-book instructional model that was purposefully under-specified to allow a wide-angle view of what it takes and what happens when e-book technology is inserted into the preschool classroom. The model consists of four components grounded in e-book studies [4] and the knowledge base on early literacy instruction for young children [5]:
The e-book as a technology-mediated environment
The physical place of e-book reading in the classroom
Engagement in e-book reading for small groups and individuals
Explicit instruction using e-books
Our research objectives were to observe, define the salient attributes and rate the functioning of each component in situ toward the goal of framing a model for replication and further testing. To this purpose we employed a qualitative approach that focused on sorting, clustering and aggregating observational data to derive quality indicators and design features.
The following is a brief overview of some of the data collected during Phase 2 of our 2010-2011 study.
Educators from across Ohio came together in Columbus today, as Ohio became the 14th state to become a “21st Century Leadership State.” The Ohio 21st Century Skills Summit was a day of learning, leading and celebrating Ohio’s dedication to developing a comprehensive 21st Century Skills educational implementation plan. The following are my notes from the day long event (which I took on my iPad using Evernote). Items in BOLD are my own personal thoughts, all other items are quotes or paraphrases from the various speakers.
