Green School
I am moving ahead on my capstone project. I finished drafting the first two phases and have just begun work on the heart of the project – the instructional design. I am working off partial content, and will be using a bit of backwards design – as I have a quiz that is used at the end of the class to assess student learning. I’m not a big fan of quizzes, and since my plan is to design this for a Blackberry and I would rather students improve their verbal reasoning skills and not their quiz taking abilities, I am going to be spending day working on verbal assessments. To help manage this project, I am using a site called Backpack (www.backpackit.com) which is put out by a group called 37 signals. This may be the easiest project management tool I have found – certainly much easier than Microsoft Entourage – which I will most likely end up switching from in the next few weeks.
I think it is a great idea that you are pursuing doing away with the quiz as a means of assessment. I am curious to hear what you are finding out about using the Blackberry with verbal responses as an assessment method, as it seems to make sense for this population of people.