Design, Science and Technology

Dr. Reshan Richards: "Each of these approaches allows teachers and learner to capture and create moments of learning, excerpts of understanding, and reflections of experience. Let’s pretend to be one of my 5th-grade math students from last year participating in an activity about tessellating patterns. The activity was to figure out what individual shapes, when arranged in a flat pattern with touching sides, formed a closed tesselating patter (a regular tessellation). This activity involved using physical manipulative objects (pattern blocks), a piece of paper to document findings (journal workbook page), and NCTM Illumination’s Tessellation Creator website as resources for engaging in the experience of exploring regular tessellation. Here’s how the QFAT could be applied to this activity with an iPad."

Read and download this self-assessment rubric and accompanying questions to help you assess your own or your students' social and emotional development this year.

The Blended and Online Assessment Taxonomy Infographic presents types of activities and grading and feedback criteria to help you plan better assessments.

Word clouds are ideal for eLearning professionals who are looking for ways to visually represent text, whether this is content within an eLearning course or writings of the learners. Color and size can be used to denote a word's level of importance within the cloud, which helps learners to acquire and retain significant ideas (i.e. bolded words) more effectively. While word clouds are often associated with language arts eLearning courses, they can actually be used in virtually any eLearning setting.