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http://teachers.net/gazette/wordpress/allison-gray/50-web-apps-for-teachers/ on 2009-12-01
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Home « Jay Garrity's Portfolio on 2009-11-13
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Educational Leadership:Informative Assessment:The Best Value in Formative Assessment on 2009-11-12
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To begin, let's look at summative assessment. In general, its results are used
to make some sort of judgment, such as to determine what grade a student will
receive on a classroom assignment, measure program effectiveness, or determine
whether a school has made adequate yearly progress
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Formative assessment, on the other hand, delivers information
during the instructional process, before the summative assessment.
Both the teacher and the student use formative assessment results to make
decisions about what actions to take to promote further learning. It is an
ongoing, dynamic process that involves far more than frequent testing, and
measurement of student learning is just one of its components.
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LeaderTalk: Formative Assessments and Supportive Classroom Climates on 2009-11-12
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When individual students - and the class as a whole - understand the benefits of
assessment, the value of those measurements is increased significantly.
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In reality, most assessments have become tools that are misapplied by being used
to manage data or student behavior through the use of grades as punishment or
reward.
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At a minimum, teachers can discover gaps in their lesson progressions, identify
areas of strengths and weaknesses in their presentation of the material, and
identify students struggling with specific parts of a lesson.
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A point must be made here: effective assessments - regardless of their
traditional or innovative designs, must be planned...they are not spontaneous
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Make sure students are free to try various approaches to discovering answers in
a classroom. Encourage students to ask for help from peers and allow them to
have access to a variety of resources and technology. Failing at any task after
a true attempt should be acceptable and not linked to any negative grading
system.
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Teachers can establish a positive assessment climate in several concrete ways.
Teachers can establish this climate by using assessments as a planned, on-going
part of all lessons. They should use a variety of assessment methods, promote
student work efforts and products being visible to significant others, affirm
each student's performance, encourage experimentation, and protect students from
adverse consequences for honest attempts and initial failures.
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Racial Achievement Gap Still Plagues Schools : NPR on 2009-11-10
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Education World ® Administrators Center: Teaching Heroes: Toss the Zeros on 2009-06-08
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At the start of the 2007-2008 school year, there were well over 100 students on
the list each week, and most of those students were failing not because they
didn't understand the work, but because they chose not to do it. The situation
prompted Garland, who is Glenpool's principal, to institute ZAP (Zeros Aren't
Permitted), a program that requires students to finish incomplete assignments
during lunch periods
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"Parent contact has also increased dramatically," observed Garland. "If a
student does not complete the missing assignment during lunch ZAP, we call the
parent to schedule time before or after school when it may be finished."
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"I really think it's all about our attitude. If it's important enough for
the principal and the counselor to help students every single day complete their
work, then it is a priority. Students seem to understand that."
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Another student cried in the counselor's office, saying, "Why are you making me
do the work? I just want a zero percent." For Garland, the event illustrated
that for too long the school had allowed students to take the "easy way out."
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The most convincing evidence that his method works is that the number of missing
assignments in Ferriter's classroom decreases quickly over the course of the
school year. The students know that as soon as a task is incomplete, they will
miss out on their recess period, a powerful motivator for the very
socially-driven adolescents.
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"When I got outside, I had every intention of reading him the riot act, but I
was stopped by his muffled tears," Ferriter remembered. "Through heaving
breaths, he explained that he simply couldn't get his work done at home. His mom
worked at night, so he was responsible for his little sister. He also had a list
of chores to do that would have taken me a month."
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"I think that teaching students to be responsible for their school work by
setting up consequences that help them succeed, such as No Zeros
Detention, has been very beneficial for the students on our seventh grade
team," explains Maria Strevay. "As a team, we try to illustrate to students that
No Zeros Detention is not a punitive consequence, but one that gives them
allotted time to complete their school work with the assistance of teachers, if
that assistance is needed."
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"If a student is missing an assignment, then he or she must attend our
detention," explained seventh-grade science teacher Tiffany McKee. "The day
before the detention, parents are notified that their child will be staying
after school to make up the work. We generally have the student make the phone
call, and when he or she is finished speaking with the parent the student will
pass the phone to the teacher who will then confirm that the student will stay
after school."
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Educational Leadership:Literacy 2.0:Orchestrating the Media Collage on 2009-03-21
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First, hands-on media creation plays an important role in the development of
media literacy, which I define as the ability to recognize, evaluate, and
apply the techniques of media persuasion. The act of creating original media
forces students to lift the hood, so to speak, and see media's intricate
workings that conspire to do one thing above all others: make the final media
product appear smooth, effortless, and natural.
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Second, literacy, as well as citizenship, requires us to be able to navigate the
mediascape during a time in history in which the lag time between being able to
read particular media and being able to write in those media is shrinking so
dramatically.
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When we write, we think. We slow down and reflect as we struggle to synthesize,
clarify, and communicate. This struggle has always been a part of writing, but
it is amplified within the context of the social Web, in which we must also
become active readers and editors of one another's materials and mindful
contributors to group expression
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Both essay writing and blog writing are important, and for that reason, they
should support rather than conflict with each other. Essays, such as the one you
are reading right now, are suited for detailed argument development, whereas
blog writing helps with prioritization, brevity, and clarity. The underlying
shift here is one of audience: Only a small portion of readers read essays,
whereas a large portion of the public reads Web material.
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However, television told someone else's story, not ours. It was not until
Web 2.0 that we had the tools to come full circle and produce and consume social
narrative in equal measure. Much of the emerging nature of literacy is a result
of inexpensive, widely available, flexible Web 2.0 tools that enable anyone,
regardless of technical skill, to play some part in reinventing literacy.
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Students need to be media literate to understand how media technique influences
perception and thinking. They also need to understand larger social issues that
are inextricably linked to digital citizenship, such as security, environmental
degradation, digital equity, and living in a multicultural, networked world. We
want our students to use technology not only effectively and creatively, but
also wisely, to be concerned with not just how to use digital tools, but
also when to use them and why.
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But in an era in which literally anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection
can be a well-educated entrepreneur, we need to look beyond general literacy to
fluency.
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Digital fluency facilitates the language of leadership and innovation that
enables us to translate our ideas into compelling professional practice. The
fluent will lead, the literate will follow, and the rest will get left behind
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What is important is that teachers become advanced managers of their
students' talents, time, and productivity. Teachers need to be able to
articulate standards of quality and provide feedback that students can use to
meet those standards. They need to be the guide on the side rather than the
technician magician
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Educational Leadership:Literacy 2.0:Plagiarism in the Internet Age on 2009-03-21
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Many commentators point to easy accessibility of a plethora of information on
the Web as a chief cause of student plagiarism. Researcher Sue Carter Simmons
(1999) quickly dispels that myth: Students have been systematically plagiarizing
since at least the 19th century.
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And because text can be easily appropriated through cutting and pasting, it is
easy for well-intentioned students to overlook the boundaries between what they
themselves have produced and what they have slid from one screen (their Internet
browser) to another (their word-processed document). As the writer leaps ahead,
brainstorming creatively while reading various online sources, he or she may not
pause to insert quotation marks and citations, fully intending to do that later.
And "later" never comes.
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Teachers need to focus attention on the entire set of activities involved in
using outside sources in writing. Review with students the values and precepts
that are still valid in the era of literacy 2.0.
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Educators should also communicate why writing is important. Through writing,
people learn, communicate with one another, and discover and establish their own
authority and identity. Even students who feel comfortable with collaboration
and uneasy with individual authorship need to realize that acknowledged
collaboration—such as a coauthored article like this one—is very different from
unacknowledged use of another person's work
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A student who plagiarizes is undermining his or her community's ethics,
jeopardizing his or her authority, and erasing his or her identity. That student
is missing an opportunity to become a better researcher and writer and is
probably not learning whatever the assignment was designed to teach.
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If students don't know how to find good sources online, they will enter a search
term in Google and look only at the first few sources that come up. Consulting
only general sources, and therefore going no deeper than a general understanding
of the topic, students "can't think of any other way to say it," so they copy.
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Students who don't know how to dig deeper have their hands tied because they
can't cite a significant source of their research—and then they are busted for
plagiarizing from Wikipedia. It may be more useful to assign a research project
for which you tell students to begin with Wikipedia but then guide them in how
to find more varied, deeper sources of information using library databases such
as EBSCO, LexisNexis, or ProQuest to verify Wikipedia's claims
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Our task is instead to teach students strategies for entering
and participating in the challenging topics and texts that we assign them.
Such instruction might begin with techniques of paraphrase.
Sue Shirley (2004) has developed a series of steps through which she takes
college students. She begins by explaining that inserting synonyms is not
paraphrasing. She then guides students in studying a passage and identifying its
key words and main ideas that must be retained to paraphrase the passage.
Shirley shows her students poor paraphrases of the passage for them to critique.
Finally, she has them write their own paraphrase of a 50- to 100-word source
passage that they themselves choose
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MIT Press Journals - International Journal of Learning and Media - Full Text on 2009-03-14
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Girls watched older women plant, gather, sew, swaddle, raise younger children,
and play roles in decisions visr-à-vis the household; as soon as possible, the
growing girls began to participate in these activities. Boys watched older men
hunt, fish, engage in combat, and play roles in decisions vis-à-vis marriage and
wider communal and extra-communal relations. More often in the case of boys, the
transition to adulthood was marked by initiation rites
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Probably for the first time in human (pre) history, the need for a more formal
educational institution emerged. Most young individuals cannot learn to read and
write on their own; nor can they handle more than the most elementary numerical
totals and operations without some formal instruction and ample opportunity to
practice, preferably with targeted feedback. With the rise of literate and
numerate civilizations, fresh needs emerged, for locations called schools, and
for adults—variously thought of as teachers, instructors, masters, models,
coaches, or even tyrants—charged with the responsibility of educating the young
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Accordingly, in most parts of the world, even today, the broad outlines of
teaching and learning are strikingly similar to one another. Formal schooling
begins at age five to seven; the preceding years include, at most, introduction
to the forms of literacy, experience of working and playing with peers, and an
inculcation of routine in a setting apart from the more familiar terrain of
home, the streets, the playground, the open fields, or the forest/mountain/coast
line.
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Education—teaching and learning—changes very slowly. The texts, the
teacher-dominated lectures, the stylized interaction between students and
teachers, the examinations, the graduation requirements, are not that different
from those that could have been observed a century ago. And given the previous
changes in communication media—telegraph, telephone, radio, television, film,
film strips—it is notable how little they have infiltrated into the core of the
educational process
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In the developed world, the relatively privileged enjoy access to digital media
tools and resources. North America boasts the largest rates of Internet
penetration, but the statistics do not elaborate on the range of Internet
experience for those who have access, from the fully wired, robust, and easily
accessible home computer to the censored and shared access offered by the local
library or Internet café. Twenty-seven percent of North Americans remain offline
either by choice or by circumstance
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"Social Media is Here to Stay... Now What?" on 2009-03-11
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For the technology crowd, Web2.0 was about a shift in development and
deployment. Rather than producing a product, testing it, and shipping it to be
consumed by an audience that was disconnected from the developer, Web2.0 was
about the perpetual beta.
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We saw half-baked ideas hit the marketplace and get transformed by the users in
an elegant dance with the developers. This was a critical disruption to the way
in which technology was historically produced, one that rattled big companies,
even those whose agile software development cycles couldn't cope with including
all consumers as active participants in their process.
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For users, Web2.0 was all about reorganizing web-based practices around Friends.
For many users, direct communication tools like email and IM were used to
communicate with one's closest and dearest while online communities were tools
for connecting with strangers around shared interests. Web2.0 reworked all of
that by allowing users to connect in new ways.
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The most significant player that emerged during this period - MySpace - was
effectively ignored by the press and digerati. MySpace aimed to attract all of
those being ejected from Friendster. They succeeded in getting a few small niche
populations before gaining traction with the musicians who were just starting to
get that social network sites were valuable. Based in Los Angeles, they had an
upper hand.
They managed to attract club promoters and others catering to 20-something
urban hipsters who were looking for a tool for coolhunting. This in itself would
be a footnote in the history of social network sites, except that bands have
fans. And indie rock bands are not just listened to by those who can legally
hear them play in clubs
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By that time, the landscape around social network sites had changed.
MySpace's popularity with American teenagers had sparked a new wave of moral
panics, driven primarily from the media's misrepresentation of teenage runaways
and disturbed kids who leveraged the site to find and knowingly meet up with
older men for sexual encounters.
Facebook was narrated as the "safe" alternative and, in the 2006-2007 school
year, a split amongst American teens occurred. Those college-bound kids from
wealthier or upwardly mobile backgrounds flocked to Facebook while teens from
urban or less economically privileged backgrounds rejected the transition and
opted to stay with MySpace while simultaneously rejecting the fears brought on
by American media. Many kids were caught in the middle and opted to use both,
but the division that occurred resembles the same "jocks and burnouts" narrative
that shaped American schools in the 1980s
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In a Friend-driven system, if someone is posting child porn, you better be
paying detailed attention to that person's Friends. And if you wanna curb
problematic behavior, you need to think of the problem in terms of networks, not
individuals. Further, while we all agree that killing off some behavior is an
absolute imperative, what about the gray lines? The health of a community has a
lot to do with its network and you can prune if you prune wisely. There are
times and places to chop off a branch and let all of the leaves fall, but this
isn't always what's desired.
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Social network sites became critically important to them because this was where
they sat and gossiped, jockeyed for status, and functioned as digital flaneurs.
They used these tools to see and be seen. Those using MySpace put great effort
into decorating their profile and fleshing out their "About Me" section. The
features and functionality of Facebook were fundamentally different, but virtual
pets and quizzes served similar self-expression purposes on Facebook.
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Adults have approached Facebook in very different ways. Adults are not hanging
out on Facebook. They are more likely to respond to status messages than start a
conversation on someone's wall (unless it's their birthday of course). Adults
aren't really decorating their profiles or making sure that their About Me's are
up-to-date. Adults, far more than teens, are using Facebook for its intended
purpose as a social utility.
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3. Blurring of Public and Private. Finally, there's the blurring of public and
private. These distinctions are normally structured around audience and context
with certain places or conversations being "public" or "private." These
distinctions are much harder to manage when you have to contend with the shifts
in how the environment is organized.
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