Ain't Misbehavin' on a Ukelele

Makin' gourd music!

Dr. Uke offers song chart diagrams for you aspiring ukulelists. Ain't Misbehavin' is one of my favorites!

You too can enjoy the wonder that is ukulele and move on to make a Gourd Ukulele!

YeeHaAa!

Rubistar M&Ms

In the research class I teach, I use a Justified-Renzulli Rubric. Here is an example of my original rubric in action. This is grading guideline that allows a student to go over-and-above the call of duty, and then getting credit for the effort. Another Gifted Resource Teacher came up with the Justified part of it, and I added the Renzulli part. We use this kind of rubric for all the PRISMS classes in the county.

For this assignment, I went to Rubistar to set up an account for making rubrics. I was pleasantly surprised that there were several categories of rubrics to choose from, making the building of a grading matrix fairly easy. I still made changes to accommodate specific needs but overall, it was a snap.

Gourd M&Ms!  The choice of gourdheads everywhere!

My first Rubistar rubric was for the PRISMS paper, the second rubric for the PRISM Showcase display, and the third one for the PRISMS Showcase presentation. It was like popping M&Ms! I had to make myself stop.

Using Jing to capture them and uploading them to Screencast provided another URL got me this: Writing the Paper, Building the Display, and Showcase Presentation but I didn't want an instance where students and parents could see that my magnificent rubric brilliance was actually commercially based (since the Rubistar or the Jing masthead is clearly displayed).

Finally, I saved them to my computer as a PNG image which I could then upload Google Docs which gave another URL to access them: Writing the Paper, Building the Display, and Showcase Presentation.

Saving them in an Excel format on the thumbdrive I use for all the PRISMS documents was handy. Not only do I have access to them online from whatever computer I happen to be at from school to school if I have access to Google Docs, but I can have them instantly from my personal device when I don't have access to them online. Logging into Rubistar allows for printing access but, again, that presupposes the computer I am at permits access.

So, where does that leave me Technology Standard-wise?  This certainly falls into the #3 and 4: the sharing of rubrics with students for lessons and assessments, and then sharing them with colleagues for professional collaborations.

And on the subject of math...

Variables...

I got an email today from one of the teachers saying several of my students came into class talking about a news report about a horrible math teacher who asked his students what do you get when you add 2 students to another 3 and put them in a microwave. **gasp!*

One of my kiddos chimes in and says "Yeah, that's a really bad math teacher -- there was no information about microwave size, sizes of the students, or wattage. How's the formula gonna work if you don't have the all the variables?"

Gourdhead counting to ten.

Now you know why I'm a gourdhead.

Gotta do this...

 A day in the life of a Gifted Resource Teacher:

Today the 6th grade class I'm working with is busily working on their altered book project, changing and altering a discarded book and inventing a new story using the words that already exists and one pipes up and says, 'Mrs. Mohr, do you know what my favorite quote about weirdness is?  It's that one by Dr. Seuss--you know the green eggs and ham man?" and proceeds to recite this quote....

Gourd Eyeball

We are all a little weird, and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutual weirdness and call it love. --Dr. Seuss



Now, I just have to say that's seeing things from a different point of view, no?

Self-Grading Quiz

The idea behind a self-grading quiz is to produce a quiz using Google Forms [much like a survey from the previous assignment] and produce a key and insert formulas in the corresponding spreadsheet where the responses accumulate to grade the responses. This is a very efficient way to grade lower level thinking (think Bloom's Taxonomy) where the answers are straightforward basic facts. Questions using critical thinking skills can be made with multiple choice or checklist response choices, but those seem to end up reading like trick questions -- the gotcha questions no one wants to encounter on a quiz because they seem mean-spirited. The quiz can be sent to students as a link so they can go to it and see and enjoy the theme, or it can be emailed as part of the message. In either case, with the advent of iPhones, apps, and The Cloud, quizzes can be available in more places than in a classroom.

Print Resources

My quizzes for the Gifted Academic Program kiddos are usually higher order thinking in nature and somewhat philosophical. They are not graded for black/white responses, so this assignment was a challenge. My Print Resources quiz is usually interpreted with pictures and limited text but it was the quiz most closely aligned with basic facts so it is the one I chose to translate for this assignment. The translated quiz was sent it to several people and myself at home. When I check my email, I found a message with the quiz as the message and a link that I clicked on to go to the live form that was complete with the book theme I had chosen.



Every gourd has a knot, but are still different.

Even then, I found the answers had to match the key responses letter for letter or the answer was counted as wrong, skewing the final grade. I used answers from a quiz I gave the class yesterday as a test. Word for word, many answers were wrong because of the variation in verbiage: collection instead of a collection, contents and index instead of table of contents and index, etc. It's like tying knots in long-handled gourds....the knots clearly exist, but they will still be individualized. I ended up going through and evaluating answers and making some changes before doing the formula to sum/average the responses seen on the spreadsheet. Clearly Tonya answered my quiz...most answers are right but because they don't match my key exactly her final score does not reflect what she knows. [Thank you Tonya, I appreciate your willingness to help!]

Because of past frustrations I have learned to rely on tutorials that I can watch over and over. This time I went to YouTube to get help along with the self-grading one Dr. Pierce listed on the assignment document. It was also helpful to read the written instructions on eHow and may work for those who are visual learners but need written words to follow.