Week 8- storify

Week 7: Assesment

Use in the classroom:
This week, I created an interactive Zaption video from a Youtube lecture. I have also created a google survey and a powerpoint slide to give access to the survey. The survey is to use the presentation rubric to evaluate student presentations. Students will use the rubric to evaluate other presentations. Every group will be given a topic and asked to prepare a presentation. Rubrics will be provided in advance so students know what is expected of them in advance. During the presentations, other students (audience in this case) will use google surveys to evaluate the presentation using the same rubric.
The learning objective would be:
“To evaluate peer presentations using the provided rubric in terms of content and presentation style.”
I believe asking students to present a topic is a great way to engage them in the content. Also, asking students to evaluate each other (just like what we are doing in our blogs for this class) is a great way to get them think about the content. As an engineer, we do a lot of hands-on group projects starting from the freshmen year. PBL is just the natural way of reaching out to our students and get them prepared for the after-school professional work environment.
Application:
By asking students prepare relevant, concise presentations, we are making sure to keep them stay on track. I believe this would align well with reducing extraneous processing. Particularly, they have to use signaling to highlight the important information and spatial contiguity plays an important part as they need to put captions for their images.
Reflection:
This was a relatively easy assignment for me. I use google surveys quite a lot and creating a rubric was not that bad. I did not know about Zaption though and I enjoyed learning it. It took me 10-15 minutes to figure out how to use it so that was great. I believe I will be using interactive videos more. I loved the idea. I don’t know why I have never thought of it before.
I have also enjoyed attending the zoom session from my phone. Sound was clear and I actually felt bad the fact that I was not able to attend the previous ones. These would have been helpful at that time. I might go back and watch the recorded ones at some point.

Rubric for group presentations:
Link to the google survey
Slide for the google survey

Zaption video (Make it full screen to fully experience the view):

Week 6: Concept maps

Use in the classroom:

In digital circuits, it is often difficult to motivate students why all those hoops we are going through to optimize a circuit. The answer is simple yet complicated: The less number of circuits we use to express a function, the less it costs to manufacture the circuit. This is basically the ongoing idea of the entire semester for my digital circuits class. I developed this concept map by using pretty much resources I had created with some branching to show students concepts are related to each other. Student can perhaps discuss the branches and put their comments as groups.

The learning objective would be:

“To understand the underlying concept of circuit optimization and apply this information to various designs and functions.”

Students can individually browse in the branches and comment as a group. Alternatively, connections between branches can be removed and students can be asked to make the connections by themselves and compare with their peers.

Clogger is very cool and easy to use. I am assuming my engineering students will not have a particular problem adopting this technology. As always, if they are asked to embed pictures or videos, that is always challenging for them.

Collaboration is definitely important. Students can jot down their own work but when they put those ideas together, learning goes to another level. By encouraging creating interconnections between concepts could prove useful for fostering collaboration and team work.

Application:

Concept maps are inherently brief and concise. That puts us on the coherence where all the fluff of information is removed. Also, we are definitely segmenting the information by creating branches and letting students contemplate on concepts one at a time.

Reflection:

I am not a big fan of big, complicated concept maps. They seem overwhelming. However, creating these “mini” concept maps can be quite helpful. I did not necessarily like adding pictures or videos into the concept map. Not because it was difficult but I thought it made them too complex for students. I do like putting links though. That way, they have the option to dig further.