Hi Patrick, Thanks for your kind words and your thoughtful post. Clearly we share much of the same excitement for the possibilities of TW - it would be great to have your involvement. I remember my own teacher training and I'm sure this is a busy time for you - I certainly think that you're ahead of the curve in realising the importance of tracking student data.
I am starting to think about more long-term and comprehensive uses for it > as a data management tool for teachers. For example the way it is now I can > save and track units over time, and compare them across years. Right now > I'm taking a Curriculum Assessment class so I got to thinking, you could > create and edit a curriculum over multiple years to make sure that you > covered everything, and use TW to visualize different aspects of the > curriculum much more conveniently than the ~300 page pdfs I'm currently > seeing. For example, a lot of teachers are now making plans in alignment > with Common Core. How awesome would it be to press a button and produce a > detailed document showing your commitment to Common Core standards, and all > without any of Bill Gates' software. > Right. My thoughts are that we can use TW to build organisational materials, and then eventually whole courses and textbooks, that map straight on to the curriculum. One of my next goals is to take apart the common core math standards and put them back together in TW and then use that as a starting point for building courses. > Then the other area that I am very interested in developing (not now, > maybe this summer) would be the use of TW as a long term grade book. This > would provide important data on both the students and the teacher. There > are ~250 learning objectives in that tiddler, for two units that are not > even half completed. How well are my assessments aligned to those > objectives? There is about a 0% chance that I can keep track of whether > individual students are meeting those goals in a spreadsheet, but with TW, > I would have a tiddler for each student and could keep track of their > results on assessments. This record could persist across multiple years. > Wouldn't it be great if you could hand each of your students a detailed > report showing them exactly how they progressed over time? (Or email it to > them, or have it available for them to peruse at will?) That would just be > one button to click if you were keeping all your grades in a TW. > This is an awesome goal and a can of worms. Have you seen the project we are involved with to explore integration of TW with the xAPI reporting protocol? You should join the group and follow our progress or join in if you have the time (https://plus.google.com/communities/113063293590109148292). The idea is to enable TW to communicate with a Learning Record Store to log information about students in just the way you suggest. One of the big issues in this area is data-protection and privacy with regards to what gets stored on the server and I think there are some ways in which TW as a 'smart-client' might be part of an interesting solution. Let us know when you want to work on it, I'd love to help. > As an aside, one of my upcoming projects is going to be combining svg > graphics, wikitext, and javascript to make graph widgets. For educators > that want to display their student learning data, this would be useful. I > used to love the simplicity and versatility of the graphing tools in > Matlab, so I will probably base it on that and Excel. I know other people > are working on making TW more math-friendly, and I think these two > additions would go a long way towards making TW a viable spreadsheet > alternative. > This sounds amazing. I'm learning about a lot of this stuff myself at the moment - svg graphcs are pretty cool. There are also some javascript libraries I would like to explore for making math-interactives etc. that might also be relevant. (I'm not a programmer so it takes me a long time to figure things out, but I get there in the end!) > I would also like to add a section for assigning students to teams or > groups for lesson activities, using BJ's taglist widget with the drag and > drop. It would be pretty nice because you could automatically create and > print custom handouts for all your groups in all your classes. You could > also store parent contact information and any other type of information > about the students. > These are some great Ideas. Thanks again for your reply. I hope that you'll keep us updated on your progress, what you've already done is very impressive. Let me know if there's anything I can help you with. Regards, Richard -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tiddlywiki+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to tiddlywiki@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
