Assessment

This project is really coming together! As of today all of our lessons have been uploaded to the wiki and we just have the final assessment and final touches to go. Throughout our entire project we have focused our lessons on meeting the essential questions and benchmarks and standards that we chose for this unit. We relied on the State of Michigan’s benchmarks and the AASL Standard for the 21st Century Learner in Action to guide us through the development of our lessons and we will continue to use these items to guide us in our assessment of the students.
To begin our unit we will have the students and teacher put together an informal K-W-L chart using Wall Wisher to use as a pre-assessment. This program which Rachel found allows notes to be shared, manipulated, and saved via the internet. Students will share what they know and what they want to know about Michigan’s geography at the beginning of the unit. As the unit continues we will change the notes to show what we have learned or still have questions about.
Throughout the unit we have incorporated many opportunities for formal and informal assessments. Students will continuously be completing papers, projects, and involved in discussions that will allow the classroom teacher to assess the students and make changes to the unit based on student needs.
For our final assessment we will have the students showcase their knowledge and understanding of both Michigan geography and technology by creating a classroom Michigan magazine and “Why Michigan?” commercial. The students will have a rubric for these two projects which will consist of items that relate directly to the benchmarks and standards that we chose to focus on. Members of our learning community will have an opportunity to view the student’s projects at open houses and other events during the year where we showcase student work.
As I have stated throughout this project, working with Rachel has been a great experience. I think that we have been on the same page throughout this lesson. We have both brought our skills and new ideas to this unit, and I am proud of the work that we have put together.

Mid-Planning

Well, here we are in the middle of the semester and well on our way to this project. So far for me there have been ups and downs. Our project started off very well and me and Rachel have had a great working partnership so far. I would have liked to been further along with my portion of the assignment and planning on working on inputting the lessons early this week, but sometimes the universe has different plans. On Monday of this week my laptop crashed and I had to do a system recovery essentially erasing everything on my c:drive (including all my computer programs and work for this class and my other two classes). My computer is running again, but needless to say, I am a bit behind in everything. But, oh well life happens and I am glad me and Rachel had a good start to this assignment to begin with.

At this point, we have outlined the basics of the lessons on teaching Michigan geography which includes: