Interactivity #2 Feedback

**NOTE that in most cases, FEEDBACK on your INDIVIDUAL SUBMISSIONS was sent to each of you through ENGRADE.  My space is limited for feedback, so apologies in advance for 'short hand' communication.

The average score was a low C (70%) for this second interactivity.

There were many excellent (100-point) submissions that magnified all of the requirements of the assignment. You did not need to be particularly creative to earn 100 points, you just needed to understand and follow precisely the technical guidelines for this assignment.

The most common mistake was including an additional narrative (or in some cases, multiple paragraphs) to "explain" your ideas. Instead, your image and caption should have been able to stand together as one coherent message. Perhaps you interpreted the guidelines of "Successful upload of image and caption as a blog post" to mean something more than creating a single post with just an image and caption? It's hard to tell (This is another reason why emailing me ahead of the deadline with any questions of clarification will make the biggest difference in your submission scores).

Another common mistake was including in your caption and/or image a technology that was post-1990 (your parameters were the years 1820-1990). Keep in mind that schools are much slower to adopt new technologies, so although the personal computer may have been invented in the 1980s (larger computers in the 60s and teaching machines in the 50s), computers were not a major influence on schooling until fairly recently—computer labs were rare. Depending upon your subject area, they may not have been a major influence at all in schools. So school-based specificity as well as content-area specificity was essential for this interactivity.

There is also much confusion about technology itself.  Music itself is not a technology.  They ways you communicate or compose it are, e.g. a pen, iTunes, software, CD player.  However, iTunes is not a music education content-specific technology.  It all depends on how you use it.  Listing iTunes as a technology for the classroom is similar to listing a pencil, a book or a laptop computer.  It doesn't mean or accomplish anything unless you know what to do with it—meaning, what makes it content-specific.  Your URLs needed to point to something specific.