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Back into the Digital Breach: Help Me Out!

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Maybe I need my head examined for the below, because figuring out how to do the schooliness and add a grade for so many types of assessment will be a bear, but I’m taking the plunge anyway.

What plunge? I’m inviting my students to do any projects along the lines below (copied from my high school / secondary History of China wiki. You’ll see cross-platform tools for Skypecasting for podcasts there, so far. I’ll be growing the list as I go — hopefully with your help in comments.). This does not mean they won’t be required to demonstrate required knowledge, understanding, and basic writing and speaking proficiencies along the more traditional lines. I’ll be testing those as well. But they will be able to compensate for any weaknesses in those assessments through projects that will carry equal grading weight with the essays and objective tests.

How I hope you’ll help: Drop a comment identifying

  1. Any modality or intelligence I left out in the “Top Ten” below that you think should be included.
  2. Any tool you think would help for any of the learning styles in the list. Because my school went 1:1 without requiring either Mac or PC — “Ready!  Shoot!  Aim!” — tools for both platforms are welcome. (I’ll add it to the wiki, which any interested person can simply copy-paste onto their own wiki page.)
  3. Any assessment tool for podcasts, films, screenplays, mashups, posters, and the whole Hee-Haw gang of products below. Links appreciated.
  4. Exemplars: Have a favorite real-world example of podcasters, digital storytellers, student bloggers or comic artists, musicians, game designers, on and on? Drop the link to show the possible.

Top Ten Reasons to Read This Page


Academic writing is not my strong point. Neither are bubble-tests. I wish I could show my smarts for test grades in other ways. Such as:

10. I’m a talker. Listen to me for ten minutes and I’ll show you I understand more than the test scores show — and I’ll be way more interesting when doing it.
9. I’m an artist. Let me make graphics — drawings, comics, posters, etc — that show my understanding so my scores are higher, and my class-work is more interesting to me.
8. I’m a clown. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert do history the way I’d like to. Let me get playful like they do, and I’ll show you my smarts while (trying to) make you laugh and think at the same time.
7. I’m a musician. I’d love it if I could write and produce music about things I find interesting in this class for a history grade.
6. I’m interested in film-making. I’d like to practice the basics — pitching a movie idea by writing a short “treatment” of the plot and characters, or writing scenes in screenplay form and directing short snippets of them — and get test credit for it.
5. I’m a poet / rapper / songwriter. Let me set this Chinese history stuff in verse and give me credit for it.
4. I’m a gamer. Let me imagine video games about this stuff and write business pitches explaining how they would help students learn Chinese history through gaming.
3. I’m into business. Let me create business plans selling historical tours to China (or other ideas). I’ll plan itineraries, make the brochure for the history/culture tourism niche, and maybe make a buck off this class in the future by showing people there’s more than the bloody Great Wall to check out in China.
2. I’m a creative writer, not an academic essay writer. Let me write imagined scenes based on the history — slices of life, dialogues, first-person letters — or just more personal impressionistic pieces instead of doing the dry stuff.
1. I’m a journalist. Let me write feature articles about stuff that interests me in a magazine or newspaper format. Or let me do TV or radio announcing with it.

If you’re none of the above? Talk to me.

–again, dear readers: thoughts? Input? And how the heck do I assess? Links?


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