When teaching InfoTech classes in the past, I’ve unashamedly let students’ final grade be based on purely project work. Creating posters, programming robots, etc is a hands-on activity, despite the digital nature of the work.

I’ve also always had math classes to deal with simultaneously, so I’ve let my assessment improvement efforts focus on that. There, using something like SBG is obvious – your content standards are mathematical skills and concepts, and they easily break down into small tasks.  (If we taught more than computation that’d be more difficult, but that’s another topic.)

Now my only classes to assess are my new Digital Media Arts classes for grades 6 and 7. And I have almost no set-in-stone standards here from the Ministry of Education.  The documents on computing education at this level are over a decade old and basically have a paragraph of guidelines that you could interpret into almost anything you want to do on computers.  I’ve talked to some other digital media middle school teachers in the area who use the Fine Arts requirements for their classes.  And this makes good sense given their focus, which is primarily working with digital images and video.  Those are something I should take a closer look at yet.

But my class is living in a grey area between art and tech.  Our school already has a solid Fine Arts explorations program, and it also has an unusually high-tech Trades-type program.  (They call it STTEM – Science, Tech, Trades, Engineering, Math.  It incorporates some great engineering-style design problems, drafting, and some computer-based labs with 3D modelling and physics simulations.)

So I get to create something in-between, which is fantastic for a bunch of reasons.  But it also means that the criteria I assess my students on is conceptually a bit hazy.

Right now I have students primarily working in Scratch and giving them assignments that give them room to grow creatively as well as technically (by exploring new code “blocks”).  So I have two layers of outcomes in mind – technical skills / understandings, and creative ones.  But they’re pretty hazy – “figure out loops and conditionals”, “explore an artistic topic into new territory beyond the examples”, “put together a reasonably good digital narrative with some branching”, “make an automated drawing program do something unique and cool looking”.

I think this’ll just get rolled into the rubrics for individual projects.  But I suppose if I really wanted to, I could SBG-ify this whole deal and actually assess those ideas across assignments.  In this case, though, is the reason as compelling?  Students can already redo / revise individual assignments easily, so I don’t need SBG to enable flexibility in reassessing.  On the other hand if I had a clear line of “these are the skills I want you to build” to present to students, it might give them more focus.

Structuring the gradebook around skills could make sense. But I think it’ll have to wait until next year for me to have a clearer idea of what’s achievable within the timespan I have with these kids.

My two “things-I-teach” have always been Math and Info Tech / Computer Science / Digital Media / whatever-else-you-want-to-call-it.  The community of math teachers online have stretched my teaching, my philosophy, my pedagogy (whatever that means) and also just been a lot of fun.  As such, that’s often what I’ve been trying to blog about here as well – giving a little back to the people who helped ease me into this job.

Plus, the challenge of teaching math is a huge one. Take a subject that’s not just the most abstract one around, but is in fact about abstraction itself, and try to present it to kids whose brains are only just growing the ability to deal with abstractions. Face kids’ math anxiety from years of past “failures” due to timed drills, being behind the curve, or just accepting the message of “not being good at math”.  Stare down that 48ton gorilla and try to help them understand trig functions anyway.

So as a learning challenge for me, math teaching taken a lot of my focus.  But I’ve had a soft spot in the back of my mind for letting kids play on computers.  “Here, kid, make something cool in Photoshop. Yes, we’re going to call it work, but shhhhh we all know better.”  I’ve been fortunate enough to get to hit both of these subjects in my career right from my practicum onwards, including one block of IT10 last year.

There are kids who struggle to understand layers, or get lost when trying to use control constructs in Alice, or don’t feel comfortable with their ability to build Lego robots.  But honestly, Info Tech classes have always felt like a break compared to a room full of math-phobic grade 10’s.  This is especially ironic because it’s not like I’ve ever had much time to sit still in Info Tech classes – there’s always someone unsure how to do something, or something glitching out to debug, etc.  But I haven’t sweated over how to keep a room full of kids engaged.

This year, I’m not sure if I just got an early Christmas present or if I’m hitting a new level of challenge-mode teaching.

I just got hired a couple of weeks ago as a just-over-half-time Digital Media Arts teacher at a middle school.  This is simultaneously exactly-what-I-dreamed-of, and totally a different world.  I’ve never taught for more than a month or so at the middle school level, and never taught a full course of Digital Media to this age group.  Plus, there is no prior Digital Media program here – I am it, and I get to invent it.

I started off with a ‘short list’ of things worth learning to do that I might be able to do with the kids. Then I quickly realized that I only see these kids for about 30 hrs per group, and my ‘short list’ started getting a LOT shorter. From talking with other Explorations (“Explo”) teachers I found out that it’s pretty normal to just stick with one topic of focus per grade and only get through somewhere around two or three major projects completed.

My super-short-list now includes:

• learning some basics in Office-type apps
• Photoshop Elements
• interactive storytelling (maybe leading into game design) via Scratch

Now, I had a longer list of “creative” skills in there before – video work, maybe sound? Web publishing via something like WordPress? Adding Scratch in there was something I felt like I was sneaking in, sort of a pet project that I would let slide in under the radar along with the other stuff.

But then I kept hearing from other Explo teachers – this is where you get to teach what you love, what you’re passionate about.  Pick something you know well and bring that to the kids.

So it looks like Scratch is coming out from under the radar and possibly becoming my main focus for Grade 6’s once we’re done with this Office-y stuff.  And I don’t know why I felt like I had to quietly tuck this in.  Scratch lets them create animations with cartoons characters.  It lets them make basic interactive games.  So they’re going to have a blast, and along the way pick up a foundation in computational thinking.  I don’t think anyone’s going to object here.

I’m not sure where this is all going to end up or how permanent this role will be. But it’s kind of weird how it’s bringing this blog full-circle back to my early pre-teaching ramblings on game design.  I’d imagined settling into a school teaching some standard courses and then maybe starting up a little after-school game design / development club for students.  Now it looks like I might not need to, because I could bring it to kids in the classroom.

Today I’m teaching on-call, and just finished up a morning lesson reviewing multiplying three-digit by two-digit numbers with some grade 6’s.

This was a weird experience. I’ll be seeing a lot of grade 6’s this year, as I got a three-days-a-week contract teaching digital media arts to grade 6’s and 7’s.  However I’ve rarely taught math for kids this young, and never done a straight-up arithmetic lesson with them.  It raises all kinds of questions for me.

My plan was to review the answers for a handful of questions, and then assign the rest of them. But I didn’t spot an answer key anywhere so I started working them out on the Smartboard.  I had also glanced at the textbook and seen that the notes on the previous page found there mention multiple methods of solving – an area model, a long-form method of breaking apart hundreds, tens, and ones and pairing them up separately, and then usual “short” method of multiplying by hand.

So, I mention to the kids that there’s more than one way to do it, but I’ll start by reviewing the way I usually do it (the “usual”).  We get one question in, and a kid offers to show us a method his teacher last year showed him for 2-digit-by-2-digit multiplication.  He draws a box that breaks apart tens and ones for each number and pairs them up to multiply in a grid.

(Drawing with a trackpad here, sorry.)

So at this point I am nerding out and rather happy about this! The kid only sees this as something that works with numbers under 100, though.  On a later question, I drew out a 3-by-2 grid and suggested they could see if it works for these numbers too. I think I heard some out-loud “aha!” moments there, woo yay.

However, only kids who’d seen this last year seemed to be following, and afterwards I had a number of them asking me what to do when a textbook question wanted them to describe why they picked a particular method. “I’ve only been taught one way to do it.”

On top of this, I also simply stumbled with writing out too many of these problems myself and spending a bit too much time on it. Add a laggy SmartBoard to the mix and it quickly became a distraction. I finally pulled out my iPod calculator to quickly give them the last few solutions.

So, why? What do we get by having kids sit for half an hour working on these problems quietly, without exploring what the numbers mean or other ways of seeing it? Part of me wants to believe that this is a useful skill, that at some odd points in my life I need to work out a few calculations by hand. But honestly, I rarely if ever am without a calculator now.

Without the extra layer of meaning in seeing the problem multiple ways, I don’t know what the value is to it. But the number of problems, while not overwhelming, was still enough that you’d be hard-pressed to make time for having kids work things out more than one way. (You obviously could cut questions to make time – but not all teachers are comfortable with that.)

Is this going to shift for the better? We already have these changes mandated in the curriculum. But how many people are okay with this? How many generalists (because everyone at this level is, to some extent, a generalist here) have the experience to be able to go beyond what they were taught when they were kids?  (Frankly if there were shifts in teaching Social Studies over the last twenty years I’d have no idea what they are.)

I’m glad I had the chance to stumble through that lesson.  I’ve got no idea how to wrap this post up coherently though as it, like me right now, is kind of a jumble of questions, hopes, and concerns.