Engrade Critique

This is my critique of the gradebook program Engrade. I really liked this program. This program far surpassed the program that we used last year at the school I was teaching at. I really liked how easy it was to input grades and have them weighted accordingly. It was very easy to add in extra credit points as well. The layout of the program was very simple and easy to understand. It was easy to get started creating a class and entering grades. There was nothing that I did not like about this program. The only thing that I would do to this program to improve it would be to make it so you can view all your tests as an average in one column and all of your quizzes as an average in another column (etc). This would provide the teacher with feedback to help drive instruction. I think that engrade is a great program for students and parents due to the ability to print up grade reports with the click of a button. One of the best features I found was the ability to print out a missing assignments report. This will allow you to quickly print up reports for students to see what assignments they are missing. This is a valuable resource for teachers as well. Teachers do not need to go through each individual assignment looking for what students have not completed it. I think that these features, along with the ease of entering grades for assignments, makes this an EXCELLENT gradebook for teachers. If my school next year does not have a required gradebook, this may be my choice. It was great getting to know the program and I would suggest EVERYBODY check it out if you are looking for a easy gradebook.

Picasion Slide Show

One of our assignments for this week was to create a slideshow .gif using Picasion. The slideshow needed to contain screenshots of some of the activities that we have been doing up until this point. My slideshow contains a screenshot of my blog, my WDYDWYD project, my individual wiki, my group wiki, and my twitter account. This was a very simple task and Picasion made it a snap. Here is the link to my Slideshow gif: Picasion Slideshow Animation

21st Century Scientific Literacy

Scientific literacy is often defined as a student’s ability to identify and differentiate between a topic sentence and supporting details in technical writing, obtain a wealth of information such as scientific vocabulary and terminology, and a have the ability to write in complete and correct sentences and successfully convey their ideas to a reader. Scientific literacy is a much deeper idea of understanding in the sciences than simply the ability to construct a sentence correctly or regurgitate a dictionary of scientific vocabulary. The theory behind this definition of scientific literacy was that every person who was scientifically literate would be able to communicate effectively with one another. A scientifically literate person would be able to differentiate between a hertz as it refers to computer technology and the car rental company named Hertz. This is true because people would be able to define scientific words, but this does not transpose into scientific literacy.

Science is about discovery and experimentation. It is about the search for truth through observation. An important fact that many students do not recognize is that science is always changing. An example is that Teflon was discovered accidentally through a botched experiment to create refrigerant. The idea that just as much, if not more, can be learned from our mistakes is of key importance for students to understand. The true understanding that science is about discovery and experimentation is the real definition of scientific literacy in the 21st century. This is was teachers should be promoting and striving for in the classroom.