Coding WeinbergCloud – An Update

Over the past few weeks, I’ve made some changes to my standards based grading system using the Meteor framework. These changes were made to address issues that students have brought up that they say get in the way of making progress. Whether you view these as excuses or valid points, it makes sense to change some of the features to match the students’ needs.

I don’t know what standard 6.2 means, Mr. Weinberg.

There are many places students could look to get this information. It does make sense, however, to have this information near where students sign up for reassessments.

When students select a standard, a link pops up (if the standard exists) with a description. This has made a big difference in students knowing whether the standard they sign up for is what they actually intend to assess.

I also added the entry for the current mastery level, because this is important in selecting appropriate assessments. The extra step looking it up in the online gradebook isn’t worth it to me, and asking students to look it up makes it their responsibility. That’s probably where it belongs.

Can you post example problems for each standard?

The biggest issue students have in searching for online resources for a specific standard is not knowing the vocabulary that will get the best resources. There’s lots of stuff out there, but it isn’t all great.

I post links to class handouts and notes on a school blog, so the information is already online. Collecting it in one place, and organizing it according to the standards hasn’t been something I’ve put time into.

Students can now see the standards for a given course, listed in order. If students are interested, they can look at other courses, just to see what they are learning. I have no idea if this has actually happened.

Selecting a standard brings a student to see the full text and description of the standard. I can post links to the course notes and handout, along with online resources that meet my standards for being appropriately leveled and well written.

At the moment, I’m the only one that can add resources. I’ve written much of the structure to ultimately allow students to submit sites, up-vote ones that are useful to them, and give me click data on whether or not students are actually using this, but I’m waiting until I can tweak some UI details to make that work just the way I want it.

Mr. Weinberg, I signed up for an assessment, but it’s not showing up.

The already flaky internet in China has really gotten flakier as of late. Students are signing up for reassessments, but because of the way I implemented these requests being inserted into the database, these requests weren’t actually making it to the server. I’ve learned a lot more about Meteor since I wrote this a year ago, so I’ve been able to make this more robust. The sign-up window doesn’t disappear until the server actually responds and says that the insert was successful. Most importantly, students know to look for this helper in the upper left hand side of the screen:

If it glows red, students know to reload the page and reconnect. Under normal Meteor usage conditions, this isn’t a problem because Meteor takes care of the connection process automatically. China issues being what they are, this feature is a necessity.

I’ve written before about how good it feels to build tools that benefit my students, so I won’t lecture you, dear reader, about that again. In the year since first making this site happen though, I’ve learned a lot more about how to build a tool like this with Meteor. The ease with which I can take an idea from prototype to production is a really great thing.

The next step is taking a concept like this site and abstracting it into a tool that works for anyone that wants to use it. That is a big scale project for another day.