Week 7 - Evaluation and Assessment

Use:

With Jen’s approval, I was able to utilize materials that I created in other Masters courses.  For my EDU 662 class, we did extensive work with rubrics and assessments.  One of the ways in which I used assessment was in the context of a job interview.  As a part of the job interview, the candidate had to take a general skills assessment and write computer code which followed a revised bloom’s taxonomy which can be found here:  https://www.dropbox.com/s/8qasym1o30xlxja/Week4_5_Assignment.pdf?dl=0

I also created a Zaption video based on my previous week’s standards and best practices series.

Lastly, I have a survey I created for my EDU 590 class which allows people who rode in the DALMAC cycling bike tour (www.dalmac.org) to provide feedback to the organization so that they can improve the experience in coming years.

Application

I think Zaption helps to implement the coherence principle in that they keep the clutter to a minimum. All the text and quizzes are off to the side and always in the same place.  The text font is pleasing to the eye and doesn’t detract from the video.

Reflection

I really enjoyed using Zaption. I didn’t know anything like that existed.  I am thinking about uploading my own training and professional development videos and added additional resource links to the video.  I think it would balance out some of the complex portions of my training videos.

Your artifacts:

Online video quiz: http://zapt.io/tqc72txm

Rubric: Page 7 - https://www.dropbox.com/s/8qasym1o30xlxja/Week4_5_Assignment.pdf?dl=0

Interactive poll or survey:https://drive.google.com/open?id=1k6sbiJl6nJeO_3F851YZkpAhzcsG6nOe_1MgWWBFbqs

Week 6 - Mind Maps

Use in the classroom

In keeping with my professional development series on programming (see week 2). I have created a mind map which shows how SOLID design principals interacts with other best practices.  In a professional development setting, I would start by having already mapped the Principals, Major Principal Branches, as well as, having the starter branches for Test Driven Development and Metrics.  As a team, we would expand the branches as a group. Once we had a fairly “full” mind map I would give each team member homework, giving them a sub-branch or two for which they would have to find a resource which talks about the specific subject.  For example, under Test Driven Development (TDD), Unit testing I linked to the book The Art of Unit Testing: with examples in C# 2nd Edition (link) by Roy Osherove.  This is a wonderful resource for TDD and unit testing.

Application:

I am using Coggle as my mind mapping tool.  Coggle, by its very design, embraces the Coherence Principle in that it looks clean and you are able to “hide” the hyperlinks behind text allowing the user to simply click on a mind map item to get more information.

Reflection:

I like Coggle as a tool.  It helps you to create a visually appealing mind map.  I did run into an issue in that the free version doesn’t allow you to do a couple really important things.  First, it doesn’t allow you to cross-link to pictures, videos or other web resources.  All your assets have to be uploaded to Coggle.  I even tried to trick Coggle into doing this and they have purposefully limited their software to only linking to images which have been uploaded to their servers (which are hosted on Amazon’s cloud service).  Because I understand how Amazon’s services work I know this is a choice by Coggle to intentionally limit their technology and, in general, I hate that philosophy. Secondly, when you do upload pictures, it shrinks them to an unusable size AND you are not allowed to hyperlink the pictures. 

So while I find Coggle to be a really neat tool, unless you are willing to pay for a monthly subscription, it really doesn’t have enough features.  Google Draw, while not as nicely organized, gives you the missing features and is free.

Lastly, their embedded window really doesn’t look good on this blog so I am including both a direct link and the embedded window.

Mind Map in Coggle

Link: https://coggle.it/diagram/V1W95Yq4BhMLJSQo/721b16e221e9bb94fda8ecb80eaaad5c7d4c92a0dcf7a9c1e3a2e54068bea61e

Embedded:

Week 5: Augmented Learning

Use in the classroom 

In keeping with my professional development series on programming (see week 2). I have created a series of posters that illustrate the SOLID software design principals. The QR codes represent six videos and two web pages which go into detail on a particular aspect of SOLID. I can see these posters being hung up around the professional development classroom or in a break room during a professional development conference allowing people to get more in-depth information on a particular component of SOLID. Five of the six videos are short clips specifically explain one of the principals.

Application 

I think QR codes help to implement the coherence principle in that they keep the clutter to a minimum. As you can see from my posters, with the exception of the first poster, the QR codes are non-intrusive and can almost be ignored entirely.

Reflection 

When I first started working on this assignment I tried to use Aurasma. It seemed like a neat tool that I could really leverage with my posters. Unfortunately, after spending a time uploading all my assets to their web studio, I found out that you cannot link to YouTube videos (or any online videos). The application forces you to upload videos from your computer. The only way to get my use case to work would be to download the videos from YouTube using a third party tool and upload them directly to Aurasma. This would be an explicit violation of the YouTube terms of service and, while technically possible, goes against my understanding of fair use. Therefore, I had to abandon this technology and move over to QR codes. While I am disappointed that I couldn’t use Aurasma for this assignment I like the concept and plan to attempt to do something with it in the future.

Click the picture below to download the posters (.pdf):