Week 14-ePortfolio Assessment

I feel that the use of an ePortfolio can be a very effective assessment tool. The series of entries allows students to look back and see how their attitudes and opinions have changed toward concepts that have been introduced. ePortfolios are especially effective in courses that require writing, as rereading allows a student to pinpoint weaknesses that are constant in their writings. From a business ed viewpoint, an ePortfolio can help a student recognize large concepts that they have learned throughout the year. I plan to have my students complete a reflection as part of their final and I wish that I had used ePortfolios at the beginning of the year so that they would be able to look back and view their progress and see how they and their skills have grown.

The ePortfolio is both formative and summative in nature. Formative for the instructor (if the students complete it in a timely manner), they can easily see whether or not students are grasping a concept or if additional instruction is needed. Since it includes work from the beginning of a project to the end, it fulfills the summative requirements for the instructor and the student, enabling both to "look back" and see what has been accomplished.

Week 13-Differentiated Instruction

While I do not have a particular student with special needs that I considered, I tried to think of apps that would help those students in the "gray area." Those that are not low enough for an IEP but that need extra help to be successful.

I have several students that are very auditory in nature and respond best when they are able to participate in discussion of concepts and relation of those concepts to real life. For those students, I chose Evernote. This is an app which allows auditory recording of lectures for students to play back at their convenience. Some of my auditory students will never pick up the text to read the chapter information that we have discussed, so having the ability to listen to the lecture again would be invaluable. It may be the only way that those students study.

The second app I selected was Read2Go. This is an app that allows students to listen to textbooks and educational literature. This app again benefits the "gray area" students that may struggle with reading the literature but are perfectly capable of understanding concepts if they are presented orally. Since students constantly have iPhones, iPads or iPods with them, no one will know if the student needing help is listening to music or their American History text. Plus for those students who can multi-task hearing the information again while they study may be beneficial.

Week 12 Part 3-Reviewing Another Online Presentation

I checked out several presentations, looking for some to use in class either this year or next year.  I found this one Prezi on Accounting.  It is a promo for Utah State University, but it gives a lot of good information about the accounting profession.  It is attractive and fast paced to keep the students interested and engaged.  Not too much text on the slides and plenty of interesting relevant graphics, the fluidity of the presentation makes it especially attractive. This is definitely unique to my industry but is a good example of a well-thought out presentation.

Week 12-Part 2 Building a Web-Based Presentation

I created the short Google presentation below to use in my Personal Finance class this week.  I have already introduced the topic however, I have to be out of class on Thursday for a TIPs presentation.  This short Google presentation will be posted to Edline so that students can double check themselves and whether they have met the requirements of the project before their submissions on Thursday.  I found it fairly easy to use, but difficult to insert files into, suitable for most basic presentation needs however I do not yet prefer it to PowerPoint, my first love. :)

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Yb31oladeBECwiUsiD6k4q2hgQ0T2C8yKWExcgpXgWE/edit

Week 12-Collaborative Presentations Part I

I recently assigned collaborative presentations in my BCA class. The students have now been introduced to a variety of presentation programs, so I allowed them to pick their favorite program and create a presentation for the class. I left the topic open-ended, the students simply had to have my approval on their topic before starting, but could select almost anything that was "school-appropriate" of course. I limited the amount of text that they could have on their slides and set a minimum presentation time of 3 minutes, which seems to work well with this age group. Most students can get to that mark and are not usually too far over the mark. Other than those restrictions I left the kids free to create and by and large they did a good job. I was surprised that many of the students picked Prezi as their format of choice. However, the presentations were as good on Prezi as from those that picked PowerPoint. The students will adapt to whatever media we have available given time to work with it and explore.

Classroom Rubric-Week Ten Part 2

A good deal of my content is taught in PBL form and group form is necessary, however I wanted to be sure that students that did the work receive the grade, in the same turn, I do not want a student to "coast" on their group members' work. This is a link to the rubric that I have created to allow group members to rate one another to ensure that helps ensure that everyone participates equally.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDNxM2JzX1RQS0pPYkI2eWxKVC03ZHc6MQ

App Review Preview-Week Ten Part 1