EDIT 451 Post 1 -Formative & Summative evaluation

Designers, observers or decision makers can improve their process by using formative evaluation. Implementing Formative evaluation provides the evaluation of the process. Therefore, the formative evaluation can be carried out when designers or decision makers are planning the whole design. Formative evaluation is more like evaluating while doing it. On contrary, summative evaluation is like a final evaluation that you can observe if there is any specific results. Summative evaluations will be implemented in the end of a project, a design or a products.

To be honest, years ago, when I was still a teacher, I didn't really use any evaluation to evaluate my lesson or my students. What I have been doing was to give tests to students. And the tests result are my consequences for evaluating if my contents/lessons are suitable for my students or not. After I started the program, I realized that evaluation has been a part which I always ignored but indeed it is important.

According to the textbook, it mentions most of the industries tended to continue to rely on learners responses to postinstrucion attitude questionnaires(summative evaluation). By my first job experience in USA, I observed the situation that we have in our department. After every computer training workshop, we will encourage our participants to do an online evaluation for the workshop that they take. The questionnaire is here http://www.calstatela.edu/its/training/sstp/

The department believes that this after-workshop evaluation can help them to improve their workshop. But in my opinion, this evaluation results don't actually provide meaningful information. Because this evaluation indeed is not well designed, the supervisor actually can't really know what we can improve or what we can do more. For example, we have a lot of students response that they feel they do learn something, but after the class, they usually forgot what they learned in the previous weeks. I think that is because the workshop tempo is fast, and in the end it doesn't provide enough practice for students to review again. So if they use formative evaluation while they design the workshops, they may revise their design process a little bit to make their workshop design meet the participants' expectation.

In summary, as the textbook mentions, industries still prefer using the summative evaluation which is a good method to observe the conclusion and continue further revision. However, formative evaluation provides us more information while we are in process. Doing by revising would make our designs more accurate to meet our goals.

The paper handiwork exhibition

UPDATE!
The exhibition is coming to USA.
In 2008 at Seattle, Boston, and New York!

This is an exhibition in National Taiwan Demacrocy Momerial Hall.

My mother is one of the exhibitors,

In these pictures, you can see there are 4 little kids wearing 4 different costumes which are

made of paper. All these costumes are made by my mother.

My mother is a paper craftwork teacher in Taiwan.

They are invited by Cultural Division TECO in Los Angeles

There will be an Paper handiwork exhibition in October in LA.

and Washington D.C.

I will list the location , date and time.

Hope you guys can enjoy the magic paper world!!

Deal with "BUSY BUSY parents"

Once upon the time...
we, as a teacher, are so proud of ourselves.
we conduct our kids on the right path,we teach them the ancestor's' knowledge ,
and lead them to create their own imagination,this is what we say "Education"

Are you still proud of yourselves now?
Do you sometimes feel frustrated?
Have you ever met your kid's parents only one time in a semester?
Have you ever encountered a great difficulty in communicate with parents, when their kids were in troubles?


If you your answer is YES,
Now we need to think about the other way to face this problem!


Nowadays, people check email everyday. some people like me check email at least 20 times a day. I spend around 1-2 hours surfing Internet(not including working hours). Therefore, half of our parents is possible that they check email several times and surf Internet for a while during their break time or office hours.

So Blog! may be the best way to communicate with your parents!
They might have no time to show up in the Parents conference. They might have no time to make a phone call with you.

But they do have time to take a glance of your blog.
If you could make your blog meaningful to them!


How could you make your blog meaningful to parents?
Leave your comments!

Be the one to handle with "digital natives"

How many of us are afraid of handling this situation?
Most of us started to learn MS office around 25-35 years old .
I "heard" MS PowerPoint at my age of 23.
On the other hand, let's take a look around our young kids, they know how to use MS word in the elementary level, and they are familiar with MS PPT in Junior high school. Some of the senior high students even know how to use Dreamweaver/Mozilla to build up a website.

How about us??

Never never too late~~

Blog is one of the best tool that we can catch up on them!!
Blog provides publishing post, sharing photos, music, and video clips.
Not that all, we can leave our comments of a photo, a post, or a music.
And we can response and be responded.


Think about that, we can create our lesson plans and syllabus on our blog.
Also, the preview, class discussions and after class discussions can be posted on our blog.
Students have to leave their comments on each of the follow up posts, and also need to publish their own opinions on their own blogs! It's just like what we are doing now!

Furthermore, the class subjects could be various presentations. For example, videoing a clip for introducing a musician, a weather, a season, a bug, an animal and so on. Or recording a sound, a voice, a song of group members. Or a group of people video a short clip for their own presentation.

Once we become a master of blog!
We are no longer afraid of handling our digital native kids. We are going to lead them to a path of learning. Also we will share and grow up our digital knowledge with our kids!

I was a pioneer, but I failed!

I started using website to publish my journals for 6 years.
In the very beginning, I thought it is cool to publish your opinion on the web(web1.0)
I was so shy to show up my name and pictues at the beginning.
After several posts, I got more and more responses from others.
some of them are teachers, some of them just "stop by".
I realized that "Newstation"(around 2002-2004,we named it as "News station")
can be a great platform of experience sharing.

Someday, we,a group of teachers, gathered together, and talked about
having a website that we can share teaching experience, pictures, lesson plan and jobs posts.
As follow, it is my first official website of my personal life journals and teacher sharing platform.
http://v2.groups.com.tw/index.phtml?group_id=teslandtesol
We also add each other's website to make them all linkable to each other.

The idea continued in my mind. I started to plan a website that can communicate with my students. But it was failed. Because most parents considered that is timewasting. And students thought they are not going to get any credits from that website. Because of the "grades-orientated", the plan didn't be accepted by most of parents and students. The plan has been stopped for 3 years.

Until......the world has been changed~~~^__^Y

The blog "things" became popular, and the interface of the web2.0 has more features which enhance the communication tools more available for all web visitors.

I think I still have chances to bring back my ideas now!

Welcome to My Blog

Hello, Visitors!

Welcome to Peiwen490
This is a place we can share teaching experiences,
technology news and Life stories.

Feel free to leave a comments to me!