Look Mom! I made a rubric!

I found the rubric to be a difficult assessment piece to write. Over the summer I had the pleasure of taking an assessments class and now I have been trained to think of only assessing what is measurable. Because of this, it is very difficult for me to come up with the right verbs to express what I want to measure. What made it even more difficult was the fact that for some of these digital stories I am going to be measuring their emotional reaction or critical thought. Those two items are very difficult to assess with any type of instrument. I found it necessary because of what I was measuring to provide space for individual feedback, not just the numerical score on the rubric.
Something else that I wanted to include was a reward for what I would consider extra-ordinary projects. I wanted this score set apart even further from the perfect score because I don’t believe that you have to go to those lengths to get the ‘A’. I believe that if you have satisfactorily met all the requirements you have made the ‘A’ and anything above that should just be counted as extra.
I think we get trained to think with rubrics that every category has to have the same number of cells and I wonder if that has more to do with a need for having an option at that level of performance or we just want the chart to look neat? I broke that with my rubric, some grading criteria did not have the same number of options as other criteria but I can justify the purpose for each level for each criteria.

http://huestiseme5050.pbworks.com/w/page/32686488/Digital-Story-Rubric

Literary Response and Criticism

I found this week’s assignment to be technically easy but the content was much harder than I thought. My assignment was to have students middle school or older to read a piece of literature and react or respond to it. I selected the book East of Eden for my project. (Students will be able to choose what ever piece of literature they want. A news piece, a book, magazine article, etc...)I found it difficult to meet my expectations without giving away the story. Perhaps this is something that I will have to be ok with in this assignment because I need to students to show me that they understood the story and were same way able to identify with, internalize, sympathize with, etc something in the story.

I included some pictures that I found to support the main idea of my Power Point slides. I uploaded the slide show to slide share and am going to embed it below. I purposely kept the slide show short because students will need more time to be invested in the literature than spent on the final project surrounding the literature. I believe a short slide show can demonstrate all of the learning that they need to demonstrate. I also think students will be more apt to pay attention to more concise shows. I also will get the grading done much more timely.

East of Eden

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Creating a Curriculum Page

Here is the link to my Curriculum Page

I really struggled with this assignment because I am not a teacher. I work with teachers, I have multiple teaching licenses but I don't teacher in an official capacity anymore. I do a lot of training and I have created lots of training pages. I didn't want to recyle one of those for this assignment. I find good literature very powerful and I think if I were to start my career path over I may have started out as an English teacher. Anyway, it is that thought and my love of "story" that led me to choose to do my final project on responding to literature.

Literary Analysis and Critique are very complex processes. The student really has to commit to read the text and be aware of all the elements of good literature while reading. Somehow the student has to make an emotional investment into the story as well. It's difficult to react and be moved by good literature when your feelings aren't involved.

My Curriculum Page deals with the elements of literature and the how-to's for literary analysis. There are a couple of presentations that I found. One was on SlideShare, the other I uploaded to SlideShare. Other than that I found some good resources from libraries, professors and publishing companies.

After previewing the pages provided in the course reading I knew that I wanted to provide more than just a list of links so that is why I really tried to incorporate the presentations. I think lots of blocks of black and white text can overwhelm a student and the text is much more likely to just be skimmed. So the presentations are there to break up the text as well as to provide a differnt type of resource.