Assess

Assess

A collection of scripts written to support computer use in the classroom for my Humanities classes from 2005-2011 at Parkway Academy of Technology and Health (PATH), a BostonPublic Schools High School. Each student at PATH had a laptop.

The main computer platform for my courses was Mediawiki. Each student had an account on the wiki and used their account pages as scratchpad, a workbook, as a place for in-class writing, for quizzes and exams and for all the stages of essays and research papers.

mediawik scripts

Some scripts allow me to interact with medaiwiki through its API, doing things like injecting pages into students' acount pages. Check the WikiBot and mw directories. Other scripts helped me to create general course content that would show up on the course wiki's. Most were in PHP and allowed for interaction with the MYSQL databases.

There were course wikis for most of the courses I taught, with an new version every year. Other supporting technology included forums and blogs. Course Wiki's have been archived and some are still hosted in read-only format. Some links to course wikis:

http://www.pathboston.com/hum4

- a senior level Humanities course focusing on the literature and history of the world from 1500-present

http://www.pathboston.com/hum3

- a junior level Humanities class focusing on the literature and history of the United States from post-Reconstruction - present day

http://www.pathboston.com/hum2

-a sophomore Humanities class focusing on the literature and history of the United States from Antebellum America through Reconstruction

http://www.pathboston.com/poets

- a freshman level course in poetry, mythology and self expression with links to student blogs at http://pathpoets.blogspot.com/

data

There was a database with of article links for material used in each course. These were indexed by course, by unit and standards. Additionally were two other databases, one for questions on the course materials with references into the text and with various multiple choice and short answer responses that connected to those questions. The other database was of vocabulary words from the source materials including the context in which it appeared, other contexts from within and outside the course (some student created), definitions, and parts of speech. Finally there was the database of the quizzes and all student responses to every question which allowed for item analysis.

general work flow

In general, whenever a new article or excerpt was going to be used in a class, I would first process it to extract vocabulary words and terminology. Visual Thesaurus vocabgrabber (if you are a paying customer) allows you to send it a text file, book chapter, whatever and then it will identify vocabulary words based upon lots of criteria. It produces a list of words along with the sentence they showed up in.

<a href="https://github.com/mckennatim/vocabgrab">vocabgrab</a>

Takes list from visual thesaurus grab and scrapes for definitions. Uses PHP and a MYSQL database