Suggestion of an Evalustion Strategy to Evaluate an Educational Technology Project

About the Project:
Name: School Arabia

Site: www.schoolarabia.net

Establishment: Amman, Jordan in July 2000.

Description: It is a digital school that provides interactive Arabic instructional and learning environment for different learning stages from grade 1 to grade 12. It provides instruction in different subjects like Arabic, Math, English, Science, Information technology, teaching methods, learning strategies.

Registration:

• Monthly: 7$
• Half Year: 30$
• Annual: 49$

Evaluation Strategy:
Name: Student Confidence Log

Description: It is a sheet of a pre and post confidence log questionnaire form. The specific concepts or skills descriptions have been left blank because it varies from subject to another.

Sample:

• Date:
• Lesson:
• Student Name:
• Evaluator:
• Grade:
• Time:
• Subject:

A: Pre-Program Confidence LevelsB: Post-Program Confidence Levels
N.B. Do not complete this table until after using the program.
Reference:

http://cde.athabascau.ca/softeval/reports/R270311.pdf

Educational Wikis: Features & Selection Criteria

Authors:
Linda Schwartz, Sharon Clark, Mary Cossarin, & Jim Rudolph

Study Purpose:
Evaluating wikis is very different from evaluating vendor supplied or proprietary programs which have a fixed set of features. All wikis can potentially adopt all of the features found in other wikis, simply by accessing and customizing the source code. This report describes the basic characteristics and features of wikis and attempts to provide an easy approach to selecting wiki features.
There is a comparison between WikiWiki Web (the first wiki) and Seed Wiki (a WYSIWYG wiki). Feature categories included: source code, wiki management, page formatting, access control, communications, support, and advanced features.

Features of Wikis:
• Editable by major browsers (IE, Netscape);
• WYSIWYG editing;
• HTML support;
• text editing (italics, font size, color);
• image insertion;
• hyperlink insertion;
• tables;
• lists (numbered, bulleted, hierarchical);
• media insertion (streaming audio/video);
• search;
• spell-check;
• emoticons;
• blogging;
• polling;
• calendar;
• RSS;
• link checking;
• drawing tools;
• equation editor; and
• Synchronous text messaging.

Further Educational Considerations:
Features rarely incorporated in wikis are: equation editor, synchronous text messaging, link checking, and drawing whiteboard (some do have drawing tools). If coursework requires these capabilities s, an integrated collaborative software program may be a better choice.

Reference:
http://cde.athabascau.ca/softeval/reports/R270311.pdf

Evaluation for the DfES Video Conferencing in the Classroom Project

This study is an evaluation study for a videoconferencing project.

Evaluation framework:
The evaluation investigated three main levels of activity:

Institutional level:
• The purchase, deployment and management of video conferencing resources.
• The place of video conferencing within overall ICT development planning and policy.

Subject level:
• The nature and quality of teaching.
• The nature and quality of learning.
• Teacher-pupil and pupil-pupil relationships.

Individual level:
• The perceptions of individual teachers and learners on the relationship between video conferencing and academic attainment.
• The perceptions of individual teachers of the strengths, weaknesses and implications of the use of video conferencing in different contexts.
• The perceptions of pupils of the impact of using video conferencing in formal learning situations on their understanding and engagement with learning.
• Where relevant, the perceptions of pupils of the impact of using video conferencing in informal (e.g., ‘off-/non-task’) interactions on their understanding and engagement with learning.

Techniques:
1. Interview with personnel.
2. Interview with students.
3. Case Study.
4. Observation.

Reference:
http://www.global-leap.org/about/video_conferencing_final_report_may04.pdf