Recap

After a grueling month of incessant grading, I finally made it through the semester. Here is a list of things that I learned:

1. A firm late policy is necessary for all assignments.
2. Assignments submitted via email should be penalized slightly to discourage it
3. Plagiarism and copying should not be tolerated and the school's plagiarism policies should be included in the syllabus.
4. Make-up style assignments should be work for the students, not for me.
5. My grading style was too kind to lab reports that adhered to the required format but poorly analyzed the data.
6. The rubric I made was too detailed and its function was lost in its length.

So, students, you have just made your lives worse. Hrm hrm hrm hrm ha ha ha haaa

Khan Academy

Through my frequent readings of Saturday Morning Breakast Cereal, I came across a link to the Khan Academy and watched their featured video. It is of Salman Khan, the founder and sole teacher of the Khan Academy, speaking about his youtube school at a TED convention.

Khan was a hedge fund analyst at a brokerage firm when he started making youtube videos to help tutor his little cousins. After receiving numerous positive emails and comments from his family, friends, strangers, and teachers, he quit his job and decided to found the Khan Academy.

There are over 2,100 educational videos on the site (mostly pre-/highschool level), all made by Khan. Each video is 10-15 minutes long and consists of Kahn's voice explaining a topic while the video shows Khan's notes appearing on a computer-based blackboard (via SmoothDraw).

Additionally, there is a fantastic organization and homework scheme created by the software crew. All of the videos are thrown into an intricate flowchart that creates a smooth learning path through and across subjects. You can start at the beginning and be guided through harder and harder topics. Each topic requires 10 consecutive correct answers before permitting you to move on.

The program allows teachers to get a microscopic view of what their students are spending their time on and having troubles with. A teacher can see where, when, and how long/often students pause or replay a video, which types of problems they get stuck on, how long the spend on each question, and where holes in their knowledge base are. With all of this information being made available, teachers are able to assign lectures for homework and do homework during lecture, thereby increasing student-teacher and student-student interaction.

Furthermore, the student progress can be tracked through each class and grade, providing a great tool for evaluating of the quality of student being generated by the school system and of the school system and teaching staff itself.

The most amazing thing was seeing how the self-paced learning was going for each individual student and how, after progress flatlined for a period of time, their learning curve suddenly rose sharply upon the mastery of a difficult topic and continued to climb quickly and steadily.

Fin.

(To get a proper, resolving conclusion, you will have to check out the site and see it for yourself.)

Hard work pays off

Currently, I am teaching six physics labs of 15 students, each of whom write a weekly lab report that I have to grade. That makes 90 lab reports, or roughly 650 pages to read and make comments on. Often, the reports need alot of improvement and my comments are ample. Unfortunately, that takes time and the students probably do not make an effort to read them.

One thing that makes their lab reports bad is the lab manual itself. Before the procedure, there is an objectives and a theory section. Between the two, all of the concepts and ideas that the students are suppose to discover during the lab are given away. As a result, the students think that instead of analyzing their data, they can say that their data corroborates the theory and be done with it.

So, I end up writing "Discuss more than the theory, error, etc. Compare, analyze, and discuss the results", "Results --> Theory --> Error", and other such things about 70 times per week. In order to cut time, I made a document that lists all of the comments. I assigned numbers to general comments that can be applied to any lab and letters to comments that pertain to the results and objectives of the particular lab being graded. The result? My grading time got cut in half.

An added benefit is that now, after having made the comments list available to my students via a Google Docs shared document, I can now see when my students are looking at the list. As I am typing, Anonymous User 1337 is checking the comments I left on his or her lab report, and I am smiling knowing that my efforts are not entirely in vain.

Thank you, Anonymous User 1337.

Lab Reports

I am currently general physics laboratories in Spanish at the University of Costa Rica. Teaching phsyics at the university level is a career goal of mine, and though I am not teaching theory classes quite yet, I am developing some of my own material.

Thus far, I have written a document explaining what a lab report consists of and how to write a good one, a sample lab report, as well as a rubric and a grading scale for each section of the lab reports. As I read and comment on my students' lab reports, I take notes, refine, and update my description of what a good lab report is.

I uploaded all of my teaching resourses to a Google Docs folder and shared it with the world, so you can find them here. So far, they are only in Spanish, but eventually they will be in English, and I will keep uploading and oublishing about everything that I make.