Week3: Exploring Categories that work for Adult Education

Thank you all for sharing your thoughts last week! We hear the terms Tool and Resource thrown around all over the place and although I don't feel we necessarily have consensus, we all have a much broader frame of reference as we begin diving into our work. 

This week we dive into the fun stuff! We will be exploring what exists out there from a zoomed out lens to determine what means of categorizing all the "stuff" out there might work best. In looking over the profiles and reading the introductions from members here, it is very apparent that many of us could instantly turn to a number of online receptacles of "stuff". One might question, "If all these repositories exist, what are we really doing here?" This week and next week our focus will narrow into developing the Adult Ed categories or lens(es) we wish to use as we later start picking through all the piles of hay out there for the golden needles. Specifically, we are going to focus on developing a list of categories that may be general enough to be a manageable and effective grouping system while avoiding huge umbrella's or subjective naming that make searching for things useless for the field. 

This week, we will hit up our digital collections to see what categories people used and try to personally assess how useful we think the categories are. If we have problems with some category arrangements, share a link to the site and offer the specific concerns you have so we can learn what values we have and concerns we have in the group. The focus is not on how many repositories we find, nor is it how much stuff is out there. We are looking at how all the stuff is currently being arranged for consumers and thinking about what is effective and what might be irritating or useless in our view. 

I will offer the following single example to illustrate how we can focus on just one aspect of a collection's categories. 

Site: National Library of Virtual Manipulative 
Challenge: I am concerned whenever I see items listed by grade levels. There seems to be no consistency from school to school, region to region or state to state as to what skills are taught in any given range. Worse yet, with standards offering some level of grade level organization of content, not everyone is using the same set of standards, the ranges in the standards themselves remain broad, and there is often no indication in collections as to how they determine their grade range content. 
Fix or Suggestion: I would like to see us focus on the use of the resources and leave the appropriateness up to the educator. As an example, we might have a collection "Graphing Tools" that include very simple plotting or number line examples and some that allow for high level graphing of polynomials, but when a teacher is looking for Graphing Tools, they not only get a collection of what they were looking for, they get a diversified list that makes differentiation easier. There is no guessing, "What grade level was this for?". Instead, teachers can focus on, "Will this learner benefit from this selection or would that one be better?"

Note: If there were things I liked about that same site's other categories, let's say the math topic categories on the left side of that matrix, I would share that as a separate forum entry here. This specific posting organization lets many conversations stay organized instead of far reaching evaluations of a site that could have many discussion threads within. 

Towards the end of this week, I will offer a working draft of categories we can use to further compare the observations we find to some suggestions already made on the LINCS materials and discussions in other groups. I have been collecting Category suggestions and ideas from individual posts, individual emails, established educational wiki's, discussions on LINCS and other adult ed discussion threads to start a category list. While I work to get that into a presentable format, I think our focus of exploring existing categories out there and highlighting concerns, fixes, and wishes will be very helpful discussion for us all. 

So, for those that like instruction, our goals this week are:

  1. Highlight the do's and don'ts of how things are sorted out there now. Post at least three examples of categories that include either things you love or things that bother you. If you love elements, please share what makes them so effective in your mind. If they bother you, be specific in what elements bother you and why learners/teachers do not benefit in some way.
  2. Comment on the thoughts of others if you feel inspired. Please remember that we will likely have points we don't agree on and that is fine. If you differ in opinion, offer your justification from the lens of sharing a perspective rather than winning a war wink. There are no bonus prizes in this work other than our continued personal growth by hearing so many wonderful ideas.
  3. Towards the end of the week (probably Saturday night), I will share a Google Doc with a list we can all start evaluating, editing, and discussing. 

As always, please post questions as they arise. Looking forward to the great personal thoughts shared this week by all!

Comments

Site: BloomBoard (BB)

 

Challenge: BB recently announced a new offering to help teachers access curated materials around the competencies or problems of practice that are most interesting to them, and then earn micro-credentials through Digital Promise, which can be translated into credit hours.  

BB released “Collections,” packages of resources organized around themes like teaching students with disabilities, and project-based learning. Teachers can search for collections with keywords, and save or share their favorites. Each collection has been compiled by one of Bloomboard’s “master teachers.” The new BB site allows users to earn micro-credentials for skills like “wait time” and “aligning standards and assessments.”  BB introduced these innovations beta form in December 2015.

I am concerned how BB vets the “master teachers” who make decisions on what kinds of PD are relevant and improve practice.  Another concern about the micro-credentialing is what kind of evidence results from taking one of those micro-credential courses?

Fix or Suggestion: I would like to see a more clear definition of what makes BB's master educators qualified to evaluate and compile curricular resources.  There are many definitions of master teachers and educators out there, what one(s) is BB using to vet its master educators?  Additionally, I would like to see more evidence backing up the value of these micro-credentials.  This may be more challenging to do for some themes, but video portfolios of work with students is one thought.  Show me what was accomplished or learned as a result of using the materials from the collection.  For project-based learning, it would be great to have evidence of the completion of a project, explained from beginning to end, by the students. 

 

Thank you Michael for sharing your thoughts on Bloomboard. It seems that your focus was more on fixes to how they are vetting resources rather than categorizing the items. We will of course be evaluating resource sites like this in a few weeks, but at this stage we are working to establish what attributes of "how things are categorized" at different sites. You mention Bloomboard has collections of resources. Can you comment on how effective you feel those categories are or how effectively they may be set up? Do you see things they do or omissions that you would offer as a fix that would help learners or teachers find appropriate materials in their collection system?

I offer another example in the hopes that I can clarify the intent. I apologize if I was not clear in my initial write up for week 3. 

Example: OER Commons

On the home page of this site, they have multiple means by which users can search their resources. They offer Subject searching, Grade level searching and Standards searching. I love this diversity of methods.

Normally, I would have a problem with Subject searches because there are many tools and resources that would apply to many subjects. OER Commons does a nice job of allowing multiple subject tags so that someone searching for a math tool may find tools that are tagged for math, but are also tagged for other subjects as well. If we choose to categorize by subjects at all, I think this concept of tagging increases the effectiveness of these kinds of categories.

As far as the Grade Level searching, I have issues with any grade level categories when thinking of adult education. We have adults all over the spectrum of grade levels and in almost every site, there seems to be little agreement of where any one topic might fall in terms of grade level. In one state a topic might be in 3rd grade and in another state it shows up more in the 6th grade for instance. I would wish to avoid any grade level categories.

Finally, it is nice to see they have included standards as a set of category tags. It seems this is a recent addition as many of the existing resrouces are not tagged consistently in this manner. The challenge with tagging or categorizing by standard seems to be that many use different sets of standards around the country. Possibly allowing visitors to add standards tags along with suggestions for use, to any resource we publish might be something to consider, but this still may be tricky if we don't have standard "names" for the standards. The College and Career Readiness Standards in math for instance has no one way people are consistently using to reference any given standard.

So for OER Commons, I do like the fact that they allow for multiple category arrangements, but I feel there might be many challenges to using Grade Levels or Standards as a means of categorizing resources in our work in the weeks upcoming. 

I hope this clarifies a bit. We are looking for examples of things we like and challenges we see in HOW sites are currently categorizing Internet stuff out there.