Some thoughts on extended Teacher Dashboard functionality after reviewing the LOOPS answers to questions.
Extended Teacher Dashboard functionality:
Data from which to generate reports for the Teacher:
Simple Interaction Reporting:
- Duration: unit total, session, section, page
- Interactions: activity, page, question, model
- Open Response Question Data: number of words, reading level, percentage of words not in spelling dictionary
Inquiry Skills:
- Model Activity Data: computational inputs, representational outputs, model-runs, computational outputs
- Customized Inquiry Index scripts: uses MAD data and model-specific rubric to calculate Inquiry Index
Knowledge Integration
- Teacher application of a KI rubric to student work
- Smart introspection into learner interaction with graphs and models to be able to evaluate questions like these:
- Did the learner identify the location of Maximum value on the graph?
- Did the learner mark the time when the phase changed from liquid to gas?
- Learner Concept map construction with: glossary entries, learner generated evidence
- Customized Concept Map scripts: parses learner Concept Map networks to calculate accuracy and richness indexes
The teacher can react to these data by:
Changing group assignments. The collaboration tool will simplify creating, altering, and disbanding student groupings. Group assignments might be changed on the fly to help lagging students, to attack new questions, or simply to encourage reflection.
Communicating with students. The teacher will be able to use the collaboration tool to send messages, images, and files to individual students, groups, or the entire class.
Interacting with groups or the entire class. The dashboard tool will allow the teacher to interrupt the small group work to pose a whole class question, diagnostic item, discussion, demonstration, or mini-lecture. Students will be able to send text, data, and drawing responses, which the teacher can scan as thumbnails or view individually. The teacher can select one response, combine data, or use the software to pick a response at random and display it to selected groups or the entire class for discussion.
For example if each workgroup generates experimental data one scenario describes the teacher being able to select and examine data from one or many workgroups and then being able to select what data is presented for students to work on dynamically.
If the activity was measuring cooling curves for different substances that transition through a liquid-to-slid transition a teacher might choose to present the data from one workgroup's experiment to the class and ask them to determine which from a list of substances these experimental data were produced. This could also be done with a more automatic cross-match as follows:
Four substances, 12 learner workgroups. Each workgroup collects a cooling curve transitioning through the liquid-to-solid phase change. When they finish their experiment they submit it to he class and the next page shows them the rest of the completed cooling curves. Their job is to classify all the other cooling curves and match them with the substances being measured. Questions could be sent to the learners responsible for any specific cooling curve. When all groups have finished classifying the set of curves the next page shows the aggregate decisions and classifications made by the groups. Any differences can be opened to a class discussion.
There are many possible forms to run this in a classroom and the activity flow should be easily modified to allow this flexibility. For example in the previous scenario the teacher may want to select one of cooling curves and have the rest of he class work together to determine which substance was measured. Verbal discussion produces queries but the queries have to be put in a form that can be both asked and answered on the computer. This allows the collaborative generation of evidence to accumulate and for this production to be technologically introspectable.
