Talk:Fiona's Portfolio Page

Instructor comments on your project -- Jz833665 13:34, 9 November 2011 (EST)

Fiona, The instructional analysis you've conducted so far is effective and helpful for your course design, which will address an important need of college students. A few issues:

• First I agree with your own sense that you need to narrow down your focus (e.g. critical reading of news and other online information).
• Re. categories of learning outcomes: as you've probably realized, your topic will focus primarily on cognitive strategies: thinking and reading skills contributing to deep analysis of news and information. You may check the Gagne text re. cognitive strategies, to see how you need to teach and assess these.

• Please work out the performance objectives and task analysis soon.

Hi Fiona,

I like how your lessons in your curriculum map flow, the only thing I would change is to make the colors very different from each other. Right now they all blend a bit too much. It might be easier for the eye to follow if the colors were more different. This is just my two cents, but keep in mind this suggestion is coming from someone who has yet to figure out how to even make and attach a curriculum map to my project. lol

--Fiona Grady 21:08, 30 November 2011 (EST)

Let's just say that when I printed the curriculum map two of the colors printed exactly the same. But I had already attached it and was out of time for the day. It's actually on the to do list to make that change.

I used Visio to create my map just because I had the software installed and had used it in the past. You can also use MS Word. Under the Insert menu, one option is to insert shapes. Once you select the shape to use you get a crosshairs cursor and you can draw the shape you want. Email me if you think I can help. I'm not sure who you are because you didn't leave your name. ;-)

--Nathan Lockett -- Nathan Lockett 23:01, 6 December 2011 (EST)

Fiona, wow. That was really well put together. I don't know how you got the pictures to look to good. I spent so much time trying to get one picture in there. I've struggled to find constructive additions to your lessons. I have a couple of questions, but you probably have answers for them already:

Are groups necessary? I see it says with your group a few times. Are there other ways to promote group discussion, especially for those who take it online?

Do teachers need to be available work through the answers and discussions with the students?

Do you feel strongly about the "get the most out of this class" section? I think it is a little redundant. I feel like you should be able to tell college freshman this once. I don't think this would be as big of a deal, but your navigation bar at the top has quite a few links and cutting out a few would make navigation easier. Adding to this I think combining sections (if possible) would be helpful. The only one that I noticed might be 'journalists' and 'play who's a journalist?'

I will take another look at it once you finish your 4th lesson.

Re: --Nathan Lockett -- Fiona Grady 01:44, 7 December 2011 (EST)

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback Nathan.

I'm very conflicted on the group discussion. I was just having this conversation today with one of the admins in our SPD. For me personally this course I've designed would be my own worst nightmare. However, one of the most important things I've got out of this class was a deeper understanding of what group work is all about. I do see how it could be beneficial to many students. It would have been better if I had been able to come up with an authenticate problem for the students to solve that related to the course. I wasn't able to come up with anything that really grabbed other than the article to sum up the class and get them to work on collaborative writing. It's a little week though. I think the class could work online or F2F. In an online class, I envisioned the class being broken up into smaller groups for the group discussion and that they would use discussion boards only available to their group. Then for the class discussions the discussion board would be available to everyone. If I had to rethink it, after the Black Box video maybe I would have them work in pairs for some of the exercises and have them produce artifacts so that they could do peer assessment.

I was actually thinking today that I needed to go back and explicitly state that the instructor would be involved in the group and class discussions. I think that feedback is really important. That was also part of today's discussion.

I agree with you 100% about removing the get the most out of this section. Originally I imagined that the tips would be different for each lesson which was why I included it. In the end I was unable to come up with something different for each class. Time permitting I will remove that. Thanks for helping me decide that! However, I disagree with your statement about telling college students once. In my experience they really need to repetition. So I consciously included a lot of repetition through out the course. That particular bit fails to add any value though.