If you’re unfamiliar with Cool Iris, it’s a browser plugin that currently works with Firefox (Windows XP/Vista, Mac, and Linux), Internet Explorer, Safari (Mac) and Flock. It allows you to preview images and video on an “infinite wall” and then enlarge any that catch your eye. The interface is an approximation of scrolling through items on an iPhone. A key benefit is the speed with which you can sort through a large quantity of images and enlarge specific images—much faster, for example, than clicking through sequential photo pages on Flickr.

Web sites have to be enabled to work with Cool Iris (examples of enabled sites are Flickr, Hulu, Facebook, Google Images, YouTube), but you can also use Cool Iris to view images on your own computer.

As enamored as I am with the interface, it hadn’t yet occurred to me that one might use it as a presentation tool…until I followed a link from Chris Lott’s blog to the Open Ed Conference presentation by Alan Levine.  What a great idea! This could be useful in either my digital photography class or my desktop publishing class when I’m lecturing on elements of design or composition. Besides being significantly faster than the media tools I normally use for presentation, it will let me easily jump from image to image rather than (only) viewing them sequentially. I’m excited to give it a try!

iTeach² was a great opportunity to collaborate with instructional designers and educators from other campuses. I came away from the week with several new links and ideas. Two ideas in particular stand out:

1. Keep a journal of each course taught. This is such an obvious idea…but I’d never thought of it! I always tweak courses each time I offer them, based on successes and failures of the previous semester, but I just never thought about keeping a journal as I’m teaching.
2. The spreadsheet application in Google Docs allows you to generate a form for students to complete. The link to the form can be pasted into Blackboard; as students submit their data on the form, it populates the spreadsheet. The results can then be shared back to students as a graph or chart. In effect, each student sees a form for data entry and the cumulative class data—with or without ever seeing the spreadsheet that generated the chart.

Did it save me time?

This was my original intent. I can confidently report that it has helped to streamline my grading on large projects. It’s not foolproof and I still have to spot check for common problems (your pre-grading sheet says you used spell check, so why do I see 23 spelling errors when I run a spell check?), but it definitely helps me to locate problems more quickly. As a side benefit, it quickly clues me in to places where students misunderstood vocabulary or tasks associated with the assignment. For example, I found that some students couldn’t tell me what leading they used for body text because they either didn’t understand the term leading, or because they didn’t know how to identify it in the software application. I would never have discovered that by looking at their completed projects.

Did it improve the quality of their projects?

Absolutely! As Heidi commented on my earlier post, I created some pieces of the pre-grading sheet as a guideline. For example, I included a checklist of the required elements of the project and asked them to check off all the things they included. While I’ve always listed the required elements of project assignments, the act of checking items off on the pre-grading sheet seemed to help students be more thorough. It also provided a subtle reminder (or hint) about aesthetic qualities that I consider important.

Did it help students think more critically about their own work?

I believe it did. Further, it was enlightening to find out what they thought they did well on, what they would do differently next time, and what they felt they had learned while completing the project. This provided another feedback loop for me—to discover what I’m communicating effectively (or not so effectively, as the case may be).

Continuing evolution

The pre-grading sheets have been successful, and I’ll definitely continue using them. One of the things that made project grading difficult and time-consuming for me in the past was the belief that I needed to provide aesthetic feedback on all student assignments. I’ve switched my tactic a bit on that as well. I now show students’ completed projects on screen during class time. This gives an opportunity for classmates—as well as me—to critique the design verbally. I can then focus my written feedback on technical skill. I believe this has improved the quality of feedback as well as my efficiency in grading.

My primary assessments in the Desktop Publishing course are projects. The next assignment due is a one-page magazine article. These projects are always time-consuming to grade; it takes a while to review each of their computer files to see how they’ve implemented the requirements before writing feedback. As Effective Grading points out, I may be spending a lot of time trying to discover things my students already know. (”I knew I didn’t have that lined up properly” or “I knew I used too many fonts in this design.”)

The strategy I’m about to try is a Pre-Grading sheet that each student will turn in along with their assignment. In addition to saving me time, I hope it will help students learn to self-evaluate more effectively. Seems like an ingenious idea to me—but not all my ideas turn out to be as brilliant as I envision. I’ll let you know how it goes. You can view my pre-grading sheet on Issuu.