This Time, It's Personal It's been a while since I've posted here. What's written below is part of a practicum with the Tarrant Institute for Innovative Technology. We are conducting Learning Labs to explore what personalization means and looks like in several Vermont schools. Below are my thoughts on some of the nitty-gritty details of personalized learning. What is personalization? Today, everything is personalized. Want a phone that will play "Call Me Maybe" every time your significant other calls? No problem. Want a hat decorated with rhinestones and a cat doing a backflip? Sure. Want to learn about anything, anytime, anywhere? You can do that, too. With the advent of the Internet and digital media, it has become easier than ever to personalize our lives. Why not personalize our education as well? Right now, as I have mentioned, we really can learn anything at anytime, anywhere. So, personalization in education to me means harnessing that ability in
The final products of the Vermont IDU. They really came out great. After doing this project for 5 years, I may venture to say this is the best I have ever seen them. Now comes the hard part--the grading. The team had decided to give students individual assignment scores for their project, reported in the gradebook individually. Originally we thought to just lump the project scores into the averages of the transferable skills, but in the end it just didn't feel right to do that. Their project scores will still influence their transferable skill scores of Self Direction and Clear and Effective Communication, but they will also have their own scores out of 20. This is the rubric we used to score individual projects. I downloaded a pdf version into my trusty Notability app and went to grading each project. When I was done grading one project, I emailed the pdf to the student, cleared the page, and started on the next one. I was able to get through my "cas