Tech celebration: Students get immediate feedback on their projects through clickers

Kudos this week to Lance, Julie, and Ann, for finding a useful solution to a pervasive peer feedback problem.

Students rest after a workout, and Julie directs them to click in their feedback.

The problem: peer evaluation is difficult to manage 

If you've ever wanted to solicit useful feedback from your class on another student's work, you've run into a problem.

You have students create a project with other students as an audience (a new fitness routine, for example) and maybe have their peers write them feedback on tiny slips of paper -- then do you collate them?  Average them?  How do you get that information to the people who really need to see them:  the creators of the project? This usually requires laborious sorting by hand, or Valentine's-Day-like-drop-offs on a military scale.

There is an easier way.

Wanna make a bet about finals? Predict what your students will get wrong.

A student pretends to take a really, really difficult final.

So, a recent piece of research from Harvard revealed that the students who learned the most had science teachers who both  a) knew their content, and b) knew their students -- that is, the science teachers who could accurately predict the questions their students would miss on a final were the teachers who were the most powerful teachers.  I'm betting this is true for all disciplines. If it's true, then it offers a great way for you to check and improve your practice.

The Research
According to researcher Philip Sadler, in this overview of the research in The Harvard Gazette, it absolutely does matter that teachers know their content:

What our research group found was that for the [content] that people considered factual, teacher knowledge was very important. If the teachers didn't know the facts, they couldn't convey them to the students

But if you care about conceptual understanding, knowing your students matters more:

For the kinds of questions that measure conceptual understanding, even if the teacher knew the ... explanation, that wasn't enough to guarantee that their students would actually learn the [content]."

Tech celebration: Travelling to Mars (and Tempe) virtually, doing science for real

Mr. Winters and a student astronomer measure attributes
of the geology of Mars, using satellite image data.

This week, a shout, or a whoop, goes out to Mike Winters and his intrepid astronomers, who are pursuing real research projects using real data from a real planet, and collaborating with a real researcher -- though they are doing most of the work virtually.

Students identified variables, constructed research protocols, and created proposals, with the always gentle guidance of Mr. Winters.

Then they presented them to a real scientist, live.

Tech celebration: literacy, collaboration, multimedia, and math via Google Docs

Overdue props this week for Kelly Lantz and her students, who have done remarkable collaborative work this semester, seamlessly integrating visuals, equations, and language to explain difficult and complex concepts. Concepts that I dimly remember thinking I understood, back in the day...  but it's clear I didn't understand them as well as these students did -- as their lengthy and elaborate explanations attest.

And what's more, they did all this beautiful and rigorous work despite the fact that there was no grade attached.