Full weekend, worked most of Sunday with a colleague to get ready for a potentially disastrous staff development meeting on Thursday. I’m designing an assignment of the whole staff to do that involves qualitatively evaluating student work inside of one of our hallmark technologies. Each staff member will be assigned a course to evaluate. They’ll be asked to enter the course and actually read through all student work and, based on a rubric we give them, evaluate it.

The tool is a project I manage that lets people collect and annotate media from the web, either videos or images, and then use them in essay writing (in a writing space we built into the site).  I have some skepticism about what students are really doing in the tool. Rather than make the case that a great deal of student work isn’t very effective– that their use of multimedia in their writing is pretty unsophisticated and of questionable educational value, I thought we could invite the whole staff to go in and have a look. One course per staff member, and it’s theirs for evaluating.

The potential disaster is just that it doesn’t go well. That they go in there and have no idea how to go about scoring student work (“Was this embedded piece of media effective? How the hell should I know? I’m not the teacher!”) despite having a rubric to use.

We’ll see. But it’ll be stressing me out until then because I have a few other pressing things to do between now and Thursday as well. So it’s concerning. But I’ll get through. I always do, somehow.

Have a great start of the week, monkeyholes.