This link has been bookmarked by 3 people . It was first bookmarked on 23 Jun 2009, by Terry Elliott.
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30 Jun 09
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The usual kind of staff development--the one-shot training workshop mandated by the principal or superintendent--will not produce the desired effect, or perhaps any effect at all. Teachers will bring technology into their classroom practice gradually, over time, and at different rates, with long-term help from colleagues and from professional networks like BreadNet and the National Writing Project. And, most important of all, teachers need to be given time to investigate and use technology themselves, personally and professionally, so that they can themselves assess the ways that these tools can enhance a given curricular unit. Technology for its own sake is not what these educators want or need.
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Trying to quantify and measure so-called "21st-century skills" now is like trying to anticipate the punchline of a joke that hasn't even been told yet. Even if you did get lucky and guess it on your first or second try, you've missed the whole point of the joke.
Teaching the New Writing hammers hard on this point, returning in chapter after chapter to the issue of assessment and the tensions teachers feel between what can feel at times like oppositional forces. Herrington and Moran write that:[t]eachers are caught in this conflict, for their students' sake wanting to respond to the changes taking place in this thing we call writing, and at the same time wanting their students to do well in the 19th-century school essay called for on standardized tests.
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23 Jun 09
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21 Jun 09
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