Name: Jackie
Email:
Web Site: http://jrising.tie.wikispaces.net
Bio: Technology Integration is my game!
Posts by jrising:
My Favorite Finds at ISTE
July 20th, 2010ISTE 2010 was electrified as always with the vibes of excited educators who came to Denver to learna nd discover. I could not begin to share everything I learned in a few short paragraphs, so I thought I would share my favorite finds.
1. YoLink
First of all, it’s FREE!!!Second, it is EDUCATION-FRIENDLY!!! But what is it? Sometimes when viewing a web page or doing a search, we see lots of hyperlinks on the page. It is time-consuming to have to click on all of those links to explore what is at each one. YoLink fixes that. YoLink scans those pages and gives a brief summary, allowing the user to broswe without ever losing his place! Now our students can research without getting lost in the process or distracted. You and your students can spend more time getting work done while researching. It does require a free, one-time download.
See how it works:
http://www.yolinkeducation.com/education/how-it-works.jsp
First of all, it’s FREE!!! Second, it is EDUCATION-FRIENDLY!!! I’m starting to detect a theme here. I had never heard of TeachersFirst until I happened upon them in the vendor hall.
What is TeachersFirst? From their website:
TeachersFirst is a rich collection of lessons, units, and web resources designed to save teachers time by delivering just what they need in a practical, user-friendly, and ad-free format. We offer our own professional and classroom-ready content along with thousands of reviewed web resources, including practical ideas for classroom use and safe classroom use of Web 2.0. Busy teachers, parents, and students can find resources using our subject/grade level search, keyword search, or extensive menus.
The site is completely ad-free. They even have a short tutorial that explains the benefits of the site: New to our site? TeachersFirst also offers FREE webinars on a variety of topics. Next week, they are offering Wiki help. Sign up and reserve your spot.
TeachersFirst is a treasure chest for help with technology integration for new and veteran teachers.
Did I mention both sites are FREE?
They Don’t Want Your Money, Just Your Support – BoostUp.org
January 26th, 2010What is BoostUp?
from the site: www.boostup.org
“A boost is encouragement. It could be a text, an email, or even a pat on the back. Boostup is a chance for high school students to get to graduation. Boostup has been helping to decrease dropout rates by giving potential graduates the support they need to finish high school. Because one out of every three high school students in America isn’t graduating — in fact, every school day 7,000 students are dropping out. That’s 1/3 of all public high school students and almost 1/2 of all African American, Hispanic, and Native American teens. By senior year, 40% of all freshmen leave school, which is a staggering total of one million kids a year…That’s where boost comes in. A little (or big) boost goes a long way to keep students in school and on track to graduation. It can be a supportive conversation, text message, email, or a helping hand. There are a lot of teens who could use one right now. Find out how you can boost a student today.”
How great is it to be able to help someone with just kind words! I sent a boostup; how about you?
Selling Lesson Plans Online Raises Cash and Questions
November 14th, 2009While looking at my Twitter posts today, I came across this one: “Teachers who sell lesson plans online raise both cash and questions http://bit.ly/4f5izN (via Scott McLeod)”. My interest captured immediately, I read the article with fascination. Some teachers have chosen to sell the lesson plans they have created. A few have used the money raised to buy items for their classrooms, and others have used the money as supplemental income. Should teachers be allowed to sell their lesson plans, or are those materials the property of the school? Who should share the proceeds? What do you think? Read the article here.
He’s Driving Around the World!!! Yes, DRIVING!
October 31st, 2009Nicholas Rapp is quitting his job to drive around the world. His trip will start and end in New York with lots of adventure in between. The article details how he planned for his trip and the many details he had to consider, such as health care in the case of an emergency. Rapp will also blog about his trip. What a great activity for a classroom to follow him as he embarks on this adventure!
Twitter Tips
September 11th, 2009You’ve heard about Twitter and maybe you’ve even signed up for an account. You’re new to the microblogging world; therefore you don’t want to make amateur mistakes. On her blog “Little Pink Book PR” Sasha H. Muradali (@SashaHalima), shares a post from guest blogger Stephen Pinto on what NOT to do on Twitter. http://ow.ly/oZfn
What Did You Create Today?
September 3rd, 2009Will Richardson is changing the dialogue he has with his own children regarding school. Instead of asking, “what did you do today in school?” he’s come up with new, thought-provoking questions. Read his post here: http://weblogg-ed.com/2009/what-did-you-create-today/
Talk About Assessment: Eight Big Ideas to Improve Learning for All Students by Damian Cooper
July 18th, 2009ETS “Assessment for Learning” Conference
Portland, Oregon
July 13-15, 2009
from the conference handout:
Damian Cooper is an independent consultant who works across Canad and the United States helping schools and school districts improve their instructional and assessment skills. He spent many years as a teacher, working in academic environments, vocational settings, and school serving students with severe learning disabilities. Damian has a wealth of experience working on ministry and consortium development teams where he consulted and contributed on a variety of curriculum and assessment initiatives. Damian’s latest resource, Talk About Assessment: Strategies and Tools to Improve Learning, is available from Nelson Education.
*************
The world is changing. Schools are changing. Kids are changing. That is we we continue to examine and re-examine our assessment beliefs and practices. As teachers plan classroom assessment, they often feel torn between the competing demands for increased accountability and the knowledge now supported by research, that the most effective assessment strategies provide feedback in words, not scores, and are characterized by responsiveness to students. Damian Cooper share 8 Big Ideas to help teachers simplify assessment. The following information comes directly from his presentation, including his powerpoint.
Assessments have to be good for kids. It must promote learning, be bias-free (i.e. socio-economic, culture, gender, etc.), and it must be flexible.
Standardized tests are only a snapshot of a point in time; you as teachers have access to the videotape. Assessment has to be efficient and manageable for us as teachers.
Looking at written student work, the common practice is to mark on the paper. How many of us correct the error for the student after we have identified it? Marking practices must cause kids to think.
Kids makes the same mistakes on page 20 as they did on page 1. Dumb. Find them on the first page, then tell the student to find the others and let them fix them. Reduce your grading time and improve student learning.
If the new goal of education is success for all, then we have no choice but to differentiate instruction and assessment. School is about support, not just throwing the students to the sharks.
Use a thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs to the middle for feedback from your students. That is formative assessment on the fly.
Use fewer grades and replace those grades with more feedback.
8 big ideas:
1. Assessment serves different purposes at different times. For example, put kids in groups to discuss Shakespeare for 5 minutes. You will get good stuff, some accurate, some not, but that is diagnostic assessment.
Think about coaches – they don’t yell scores at their players during their practices….the summative is the season record.
Ungraded practice quizzes before the unit test would be a good idea.
The word assess really means to sit beside
2. Assessment must be planned and purposeful.
Students need to know how they are going to be graded. They have that right and we can only do that if we plan our assessments.
Backward Design Program Planning
Stage 1: Identify targeted understanding.
Stage 2: Determine appropriate assessment of those understandings.
Stage 3: Plan learning experiences and instruction that make such understanding possible.
3. Assessment must be balanced, including oral and performance as well as written tasks and be flexible in order to improve learning for all students
Think about driving – solving driving problem by not testing the student in the car, instead if they get 80% on written exam. Multiple choice aren’t bad but they are only a test of knowledge. Necessary evidence but never sufficient evidence. – need balance of Students Write, Do, and Say. Teachers: mark, observe or listen. Authenticity is key – change a book report into a book review. Have kids find example of book review, then group together and have them find the criteria of what is in a book review.
4. Assessment and instruction are inseparable because effective assessment informs learning.
5. For assessment to be helpful to students, it must inform then in words, not numerical scores or letter grades, what they have done well, what they have done poorly, and what they need to do next in order to improve
When classroom culture focuses on rewards, gold stars, etc. they the students look for ways to obtain the best marks rather than ti improve their learning. One reported consequence is that whey they have any choice, students avoid difficult tasks.
6. Assessment is a collaborative process that is most effective when it involves self, peer, and teacher assessment.
7. Performance stadards are an essential component of effective assessment.
Students must know what quality looks like
We need fewer rubrics but they need to be GOOD rubrics.
8. Grading and reporting student achievement is a caring, sensitive process that requires teacher’s professional judgement.
Grades are crude summaries of lots of information.
Curriculum Mapping with Assessment FOR Learning: Classroom GPS for Student Success
July 18th, 2009Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs & Dr. Rick Stiggins presented simulataneously on the topic. The following statements are some of the highlights.
The wrong people meet to discuss what’s best for students – high school departments meet almost exclusively – instead everyone who teaches 9th grade should be in a room together, not by departments.
Jacobs: every single child who graduated in Rhode Isalnd could not graduate unless they had a digital portfolio that goes all the way back to their kindergarden year, showed a sample of a young girl reading, stumbling over words. then showed same girl 6 months later reading with fluidity….
use flip cameras – inexpensive technology
A gap in US assessment is 90% of assessments are paper/silent. Thus leaving out speaking & listenting. I.E. – Foreign language teachers must allow students to speak in spanish and speak to each other…why don’t other teachers allow this?
In Japan, every 4th question is a word problem, students are told not to solve them but to translate the directions because if students don’t understand what to do, how can they answer the questions? That is the assessment
35 – 40% of achievement testing errors are READING errors according to a study done by McRel.
State standards are antiquated; the one missing adverb from all state standards is “independently.” Students need to know what to do. Atandards are written as though each kid is fluent in English – many have schools with ESL learners.
Draw the line in the sand and talk about what century you are teaching in.
Need to open up menu of assessments. For example: Student is having trouble with 8th grade math. Jacobs doesn’t believe there is such thing as 8th grade math tests, it is 8, 7 , 6, 5 , 4, etc. You can’t treat the problem until you know where it came from. -This is vertical mapping.
School leadership should be about using data driven dialogue.
We have differentiation instruction for our students, why not differentiated professioanl development for our teachers? Consider a range of pd venues: various groupings, handss-on labs, small workshops, work sessions, on-line courses, staff development days based on data ovserving mentors, peer coaching.
Everyone needs to be part of a global community.
Jacobs highlighted Tim Tyson’s site, the Mabry Film Festival: #1 thing Tim said is I HAVE TO BE A LEARNER, so leaders start learning.
Leadership needs to look at the cumulative; leadership is about making sure there is a connectivity between grades.
Stiggins:
Students need:
1. to see learning destination.
2. to learn to assess own work to see strengths and what needs improvement.
3. track growth to know where they are now on the route and what comes next.
4. If you cannot do any of the above, tell your teacher right away!
Stiggins says everyone needs time and opportunity to learn.
The Way Ahead in Grading by Ken O’Connor
July 18th, 2009ETS Assessment Conference, Portland Oregon, July 2009
All content in this post comes directly from Ken O’Connor’s presentation. Each statement came from a slide or is an anecdote that he shared.
Ken O’Connor is an independent consultant on assessment, grading, and reporting. He has been a staff development presenter and facilitator in for states in the USA, eight provinces in Canada and in ten countries outside North America. His twenty-three year teaching career included experience as a geography teacher and department head at six schools in Toronto and Melbourne starting in 1967. Ken was a curriculum coordinator responsible for Student Assessment and Evaluation and Geography for the Scarborough Board of Education(and then the Toronto District School Board).He also worked as a consultant on Secondary Assessment at the Ontario Ministry of Education. He is the author of A Repair Kit for Grading: 15 Fixes for Broken Grades, ETS/ATI. Portland, OR, 2007 and How to Grade for Learning: Linking Grades to Standards, Third Edition, Corwin, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2009. Articles written by
After almost twenty years of standards-based schools, the time has come to say that traditional grading practices are no longer acceptable and to demand changes, especially in secondary and colleges. This session presented the six things that must be done to make grading effective and provide opportunities for participants to share developments in their schools/districts.
“The grading box is alive and well, and in some schools and classrooms, it is impenetrable.” Patterson, William “Breaking Out of Our Boxes,” Kappan, April 2003, 572.
“Fair does not mean equal; yet when it comes to grading, we insist that it does.” (Patterson, 572)
“‘School districts must have a shared vision of what the primary purpose of grades is.’ O’Connor believes grades should be purposed as a means to communicate student achievement. The essential question we must ask is ‘how confident are you that the grades students get in your school are consistent, and supportive of learning (is it obvious to everyone that the focus is learning, not grades?).’”
“Grades are broken when they include ingredients that distort achievement, arise from low quality or poorly organized evidence, are derived from inappropriate number crunching and when they do not support the learning process.”
“It is no longer acceptable to have ‘broken grades’ in standards-based systems where the objective is proficiency for all. Grading is not — and should never have been – a private practice.” Teachers are not independent contractors — schools/districts must have policies and procedures and demand that all teachers follow regardless of their personal preferences/beliefs.
O’Connor’s Six Musts/Demands (taken directly from his presentation):
1.standards-based, no single subject grades: base grades on, and provide grades for, the intended learning goals, which means very limited use of single subject grades “The principal limitation of any grading system that requires the teacher to assign one number or letter to represent…learning is that one symbol can convey only on meaning……One symbol cannot do justice to the different degrees of learning a student acquires across all learning outcomes.” Tombari and Borich, Authentic Assessment in the Classroom, Prentice Hall, 1999, 213
2.performance standards – no %: use performance standards with a limited number (2-7) of clearly described levels which means no use of a percentage scale. “Performance standards specify ‘how good is good enough.’ They related to issues of of assessment that gauge the degree to which content standards have been attained…They are indices of quality that specify how adept of competent a student demonstration should be.” Kendall, j and R. Marzano Content Knowledge: A compendium of standards and benchmarks for k-12 education, first edition, McREL, 1997, 16-17.
3. achievement separated from behaviors – late, missing, academic dishonesty, attendance: limit the student attributes included in grades to Individual ACHIEVEMENT which means no penalties and no bonuses. Our grades need to be as pure measurements of achievement as we can make them. In Ontario, students are reported on separately in the areas of teamwork, attitude, organization, etc. These are still important and part of the Provincial Report Card, but they are entered separately, so that the grade is a pure representation of student achievement.
4. summative only – “comment only, no mark” formative assessment: ultimately if students see a grade, they ignore the comments. Stop wasting your time and that of students. If it is formative assessment, then it is descriptive feedback that should be provided. No grade is necessary at this point.
5. more recent emphasized, some not all evidence: Grades are nothing more than evidence of a student’s achievement. Therefore, the most recent evidence should be emphasized and not all evidence should be considered.
6. number crunching, no means, no zeros: The general grading scale allows for a 10 point differential from one letter grade to the next, except for the F. In some cases the F goes from 0 – 60. There’s 60 points there; there is no need to use a zero.
Implementing Innovative and Effective Assessment Strategies at the Secondary Level by Myron Dueck
July 14th, 2009ETS “Assessment for Learning” Conference
July 13 – 15, 2009
Myron Dueck, and educator with 15 years in education in Manitoba, New Zealand, and British Columbia described his own experiences in implementing non-traditional assessment and grading strategies. He shared many classroom examples and stories while addressing a variety of topics which included, no “zeroes”, linking standardized outcomes to in-class assessment, and retesting efficiently and effectively according to tangible data. This session highlighted how changes in grading and assessment can increase the level of accountability and ownership students take regarding their own learning. Dueck also discussed the positive effects that grading changes can have on teacher-student relationships and parent-teacher interviews.
I’ve included some highlights of his presentation.
His rules:
1. I need to establish an environment in which my students gain confidence and feel less anxiety, stress, and confusion.
2. I need to remember that academic threats may not affect the behavior of students already failing.
3. I must remember that the avenues I select for my students to display knowledge will significantly affect the extent to which a student may be able to give evidence of his/her knowledge.
4. My school must be a place where parents form positive relationships.
The school board decided to the following in 2007:
1. Stop grading homework. (”Homework” does not refer to project or major assignments that were started in class, but require extra time to complete.)
2. Stop reducing scores for late work.
3. Stop using “0″ for work not handed in.
The school did not make this a policy.
Administration at his school used the book 15 Fixes for Broken Grades. Each staff meeting, one fix would be pulled for discussion.
