I know that I have been making rapturous posts about the joys of returning to the in person classroom and doing curriculum design without having a textbook, so let me be sure to mention that it's not all roses and sunshine. Yesterday, I decided it was time to start adding more material to the course shell.
Yes, even in an in person classroom, I'm creating a course shell. I'm one of those people who sees the advantages. Even before I was an administrator, I saw the value of putting materials in an accessible place in case of death or disaster. I've been the teacher who had to step into a class when the original teacher had to drop out, and it would have been easier had there been a course shell.
I had already put the syllabus in the course shell, which was easy. Yesterday, I created a module to remind people of what we did last week. Actually, it was simpler than that. Here's the module for last week:
"One reason why I didn't assign a grammar handbook or a College Composition textbook, the major reason, is that so much rich material exists online for free. My favorite is the Excelsior OWL (online writing lab) site. It's got modules on grammar, research, how to write an essay, and so much more. It will be a valuable resource across disciplines as you make academic progress. It's even got resources to help you with a job search.
Here's the link so that you can start exploring: https://owl.excelsior.edu/'
It was easy to create this module--hurrah! Later in the afternoon, I decided to attempt something that I expected to be more challenging: the gradebook. Creating a gradebook was much less intuitive than I hoped.
It would help if the directions told me to create assignments first and then link them to the gradebook. Instead, I typed each one into the gradebook, and then I couldn't enter the points that the Gradebook kept requesting. I couldn't figure out how to delete anything, but finally I clicked the right combination.
That still left me with my problem, so I decided to attempt the process from the assignment end. Here, too, the directions should have told me that I had to enter the points, and then the pull-down menu that lets me link to the gradebook would appear. Instead, I had to take a leap of faith.
I'm glad that I've done this work before, and that I've been teaching with a course shell for so long. When I first started teaching online classes, I was terrified of doing something that would destroy the shell itself. Now I know that it's unlikely.
So I spent another hour, entering points and percentages, and trying to remember the elementary math that I likely was never taught about percentages. For me, having multiple daily writing assignments that would count for 20% of the grade--that was hard to figure out how to put into the gradebook. Since I said I would take the top 8 grades, I entered 8 daily writing grades as assignments, which each count 2.5% of the grade. I think the math works, but I'll likely do some calculating the old-fashioned way, with numbers on paper and calculator, to be sure.
There was a moment when I was tempted to abandon the online gradebook, to go back to creating a gradebook the way that I did it years ago when I first started teaching, on paper, in those small notebooks with a green plastic-y cover and paper that looked like a cross between a ledger and graph paper.
But I know that having a gradebook in a course shell is important not just for me, for the administration, and for the registrar. It's good for students to be able to look up their grades and to know how they are doing. And it's good for me: it's important to learn how to use the technology, and it will help me to have everything for the class in one place that I can access from whatever part of the roads I'm traveling (and here I mean literal roads, since I'm going to South Carolina twice a week and Tennessee once a week for this semester).
No comments:
Post a Comment