Still learning but getting there

The advantages of Praze certainly outweigh the problems that I have been encountering getting it set up.

For my purposes one of the elements that I really appreciate is the automatic distribution of work for students to review that means that I do not have to keep in mind all that variables of students in the same group not marking their partners work and the fact that I want all students to have a go at supplying feedback to two other projects - it distributes or simulates and then you check and try again.

However in the process of trying this out I thought you needed students to have submitted work. This may not be the case. However in my ignorance I got the class to do a test submission last week of any old file that they had lying around.

This was a great thing for me as I got to see what happened and got a general idea of the issues that the students faced. One of the good things was that I did the test upload for students online while we were all in the virtual classroom environment Elluminate and I even got one of the students to share their own application and view of what they saw in Praze so I got a pretty good idea of what the students perspective was when they went into Praze.

Now clearly that studnet perspective is possible withe the student log on that Lyn and I have to access the LMS. This however has its own issues. What we found was that we had to upload something ourselves before we got into the other areas of Praze including the review of other peoples work. This works to some extent but it is so much better when you have the whole class and you can do a real distribution rather than one between two.

Now the other issue that arose after Lyn and I submitted work was that in that assignment in Praze we could not then be eliminated from the distribution and so we kept appearing as reviewers and reviewees even though I tried to sxclude out work so that it was jsut the students review ing the students.

To get around this i closed off that assignment and started a new one without Lyn and I in the class at all.

That seemed to work (thought there mighet be another way to do this but did not have time before the submission deadline) as it was so close to the deadline i think I confused some of the students because I had to get them all to resubmit and although some were aware that the original submission was a test some had subsequently resubmitted there real draft. This spooked them a bit and made them feel the submission process was perhaps unstable and that even if they submitted again "could I give a guarantee that there would be no need to submit a 3rd time".

I felt quite confident giving that guarantee because again perhaps through ignorance I could not fully delete or delete at all the assignment files that had been uploaded inthe original test. SO because I had that difficulty I knew that I could guarantee no work would be lost and no furhter uploading the same stuff would be required.

The Praze Learning Curve

Still a little unsure about names of things for example students can sign up for a topic at the moment by just putting any title they want in. I was hoping that by putting them in a group that the only topic they were in was the one there group was working on - not sure if you can see what I mean here. The topics and the groups are the same and have been allocated so digning up is not needed which was what I had it set it up for earlier but the submit work link was greyed out so there was not a way to submit until I changed that attribute and then it was available.

The reality is perhaps not really what Praze is designed for there are a number of group projects some have only one person some have two in any case each group only submits one piece and the members of that group cannot review their own groups work.

Not sure that allowing them to sign up for a topic that they supplied the title of is the way to go here but it did allow for the submission of some work.

Do you understand what I need to do to allow them to be able to submit work on behalf of their group and not worry about the topic and then only review other group submission other than their own group's