Reviewing my Desired Goals

I pulled out my UbD project plan to look over my Desired Goals of my career unit:

• Oregon Department of Education career related learning standards:
• Students will develop skills to assess personal characteristics, interests, abilities, and strengths.
• Students will develop skills in identifying, evaluating, and using a variety of resources for exploring personal, educational, and career choices.
• National Educational Technology standards for students:
• NETS*S #3: Students use productivity tools to collaborate in constructing technology-enhanced models, prepare publications, and produce other creative works.
• NETS*S #4: Students use telecommunication to collaborate, publish and interact with peers, experts, and other audiences
• NETS*S #5: Students use technology tools to locate, evaluate, and collect information from a variety of resources.

I decided to do a quick check of how I am doing on meeting some of these goals:

• This past week my students did a great job of using technology tools to locate and collect information and a little bit of evaluation - but I think I will focus a blog topic on that.
• Students will start to prepare some type of documentation and an interactive component of their Career kiosk this week.
• We are using wikispaces for collaborative planning of the career projects. Maybe I could encourage the students to seek out resources by experts through email or listservs.
• The students took a personality career survey and identified which traits matched particular careers. They also used the Librarians pathfinder to locate information on careers. I think they need to look outside of the Internet for more sources: interviews, primary documents, videos on unitedstreaming, etc.
• I'm still a little unsure of how specific technology skills are developing. I need to find a better way to assess this in an authentic manner.
• The groups are still a little uneasy around each other. I was hoping blogging would help the communication issues - I will encourage more communication on the wiki and Moodle.
• I feel a little uneasy about the progress so far. Its going OK - but I don't yet see the "excitement" of making an authentic project yet. I think it will help when they start assembling the kiosk and making the interactive component. We'll see ...