My Assignment This Week

This week we explored applications and multi-media applications that can be used to meet educational standards.  

There are two standards I’ve identified this week that might play a crucial role in the setting I’ll be working in.  I found them both in the College and Career Readiness Standards prepared for the U. S. Department of Education by Susan Pimentel (Pimentel, 2013).  I’ll be teaching Organizational Ethics at the undergraduate level.  Both standards address speaking and listening skills, and require students to develop critical thinking skills as well as the interpersonal skills required to effectively present information (Pimentel, 2013). 

The first standard is: Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric.  To meet this standard a student will have to employ critical thinking skills and analyze the speaker’s logic and arguments; and draw a conclusion as to whether or not the speaker adequately supported his argument.

A great application I will use to help students meet this standard is TED Talks, a free download from iTunes.  A simple search on leadership will produce a huge playlist of talks that a student could watch and review.  My strategy to teach to this standard will be to assign each student to select a TED Talk on leadership to watch and write a short report about.  The rubric I develop will steer the students toward using higher-level critical thinking skills to evaluate the speaker’s ability to effectively express their point of view.

The second standard is: Present information, findings, and supporting evidence such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning and the organization, development, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.  To meet this standard students must be able to present persuasive arguments is a clear and concise manner. 

There are several applications that support the development of this standard including YouTube, PowerPoint, Flickr, and Blogs (Richardson, 2010).  My strategy to teach this standard will piggy back of the first assignment by having students develop presentations based on the reports they wrote for the TED Talk they reviewed.  The rubric I develop will encourage them to use a multi media presentation that includes audio and visual media, to demonstrate how they analyzed the presentation reviewed and why they formed their opinion of the speaker’s effectiveness.  

 

Pimentel, S. (2013).  College and Career Readiness Standards for Adult             Education.  Prepared by MPR Associates, Inc. Berkeley, CA.  Prepared           for U.S. Department of Education.

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.