Response to "Week 2 Ch. 5: Elaborate: Technology Application Activity"

Week 2 Ch. 5: ELABORATE: TI Workshop

Ch. 5 Technology Application Activity 

1. I have no idea how to get anything related to Scribus up here. I tried uploading the document I made, but it doesn't seem like it will work. So you'll just have to take my word that I did it. I had created the beginnings of a classroom newsletter. Since my last name works so nicely in an alliterative fashion with a number of different words (just look at the title of this blog site), I had given my newsletter the title of "Larkin's Letter". 

I like the idea of a newsletter for the classroom, particularly for a social studies class. Part of the importance of social studies is making sure students are informed about the world around them, and that starts with being informed about their school and classroom. 

I also like the idea of using printed objects like newsletters as creative ways to engage with the content of history. I think recounting events in unconventional ways is good way to tackle the subject. In other words, having students write news articles about past events as if they just happened makes those events feel more immediate, real and important. 

2. I'm not a big fan of rubrics. I think they tend to be poorly designed. Their designations between different levels tend to be wishy-washy. For instance, what exactly qualifies a 5 being superior to a 4. Then there's the fact that they're very constricting. They sap away the potential for creativity and ambition. 

However, I understand the appeal. They create expectations. They set standards. They give a mould for students to feel comfortable that they know exactly what they're supposed to be producing. 

Case in point against rubrics, take the following rubric pulled off of Rubistar's website. It's a pretty terrible rubric. It tells students exactly what to do and exactly how to do it. That's not an assignment; that's a dictation.  

I had all sorts of trouble creating my own rubric. For some reason, the rubric I made myself wouldn't format itself into an actual, nice looking rubric. So I just took a screenshot of the information as put in the rubric generator. But that screenshot and the screenshot of the pre-made rubric caused the formatting of this post to become so out of whack that Blogger refused to publish the post with the incorporated screenshots.

The rubric I made focused on the expected elements of a persuasive essay. It looked at four categories: Intro and Thesis, Knowledge of Subject, Analysis, and Organization. These are the building blocks of any good essays. The specifics for each of the four levels of grading for each category looked at at how well the students had done each with increasing lack of competency as the grade level decreased. The descriptions for higher categories of success actually had far more information describing how to acquire that level of the standard; after all, a higher degree of difficulty and technical aptitude is required so more hurdles are required to achieve it. The lowest levels of each standard described an absence: a thesis so bad it barely existed or a thesis that altogether didn't exist; an absence of analysis altogether; next to no content knowledge utilized or content knowledge that was incredibly faulty or inconsistent; an essay so poorly written and organized that by all appearances it lacks an intro and a conclusion. 

3. I really couldn't see myself using Inkscape. It just comes across like a goosed up Microsoft Paint. It's not particularly intuitive and I think it makes things as basic as placement of text unnecessarily difficult and cumbersome. 

Again, I couldn't figure out how to get the image up here that I had created with Inkscape. I chose to create a log for my classroom. Since I'm not particularly imaginative the sign just said: "Mr. Larkin's Room". It was slightly less boring that that sounds. Since I got fed up of dealing with the typing interface I decided to use one of the drawing aps and I filled in the lines with multiple colors, including blue, red and green.