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» DI 503: Christine’s Legacy No Looking Back — Wilkes IM Blog of Sue Hellman about 19 hours ago
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Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas: The Turnaround Dilemma: Convert or Close Down? on 2009-11-03
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The report out last week on the results of a study looking at Chicago's efforts to close down failing schools got me thinking. In its study, the Consortium on Chicago School Research examined the impact on students of shutting down 18 chronically low-performing elementary schools in the Windy City.
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The bottom line, according to this study, was that the students who were displaced by the closings just ended up at other low-performing schools in the district. Their achievement, as measured by test scores, did not improve all that much, compared to that of students who continued to attend similarly low-performing schools.
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Districts won't be required to close down schools to qualify for the new federal turnaround grants, but it's clear from the draft guidelines issued so far that the federal government really likes that approach.
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school superintendents faced with failing schools have a difficult choice to make: Transform the schools or shut them down and start from scratch?
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Open Office 4 Kids is good for adults, too on 2009-11-01
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Open Office 4 Kids is a slimmed-down version of the open source Microsoft Office alternative OpenOffice.org.
The target age group for Open Office 4 Kids is 7-12
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Less UI clutter helps make OO4K super-fast
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OO4Kids also has large, very obvious buttons for all of the most common functions of each Office app.
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How schools get it wrong - thestar.com on 2009-10-31
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We've made quantum leaps in understanding children's developing brains. So why are classrooms still organized like last century's assembly lines?
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do we agree on what schools are for? Or, for that matter, the goal of education?
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I've spent chunks of the past year in classrooms all over the world, pondering this question.
One of the worst experiences was in a respectable public middle school in North America where I was giving a talk in the auditorium. Teachers patrolled the sides of the room like prison guards, silently threatening the children by looming over them when they showed the least bit of enthusiasm.
I was telling the kids stories and asking them questions, and they were getting all excited figuring out answers despite the menacing presences. Finally, one of their teachers sidled up to me and said: "Don't ask them questions. Just tell them what you want them to know."
I formed the image that she wanted me to just zip open their heads and pour in the information, unfiltered by their own ideas. It felt like she thought their brains were just storage silos.
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Is it for the transmission of culture and potted knowledge, akin to filling a CD-ROM? Is it to foster skills that will serve society down the road, or make dutiful employees? Or perhaps it's a strategy to make sure a nation's gross domestic product keeps rising?
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Is it a sorting mechanism aimed at working out where in the class system a student ought to land? Or to encourage upward mobility? Should it build character? Endow morals?
Is it a way for the new generation to question the values of the old? Or is it for making sure they don't?
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In What's the Point of School? Rediscovering the Heart of Education, he notes that one of these hidden, ancient images is of a boy preparing for the priesthood. That model, developed 4,000 years ago, holds that knowledge is the "eternal Truth," never to be questioned.
"The image of school as monastery persists up to the present and the classrooms of Mesopotamia, 2500 B.C., would be instantly recognizable to the students of today," he writes.
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"(This supposes that knowledge) can be standardized, installed in manuals called `textbooks,' and chopped up into different sized bits – syllabuses, topics, schemes of work, and eventually the content of individual lessons – that can be bolted on, as it were, to students' minds bit by bit," Claxton writes.
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Today, many parents and teachers believe that the best defence against an uncertain future is to teach children to learn how to learn. To them, that is the goal of education.
They believe the education system should unearth and ignite their children's passion, their intrinsic desire to learn, the deep joy of discovery.
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neuroscientific findings are telling us that the brain learns – or forms strong neural connections – when the child is in a calm, emotionally regulated state.
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"The first question is: Have we created an educational workforce that has the tools to perform this holistic function? And of course the answer is: No, we haven't."
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The teacher becomes a guide and model, a co-conspirator on the engrossing quest for understanding and self-knowledge.
And what should they guide and model? The higher-order habits of mind that characterize the expert investigator, researcher, thinker and learner, says Claxton.
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the school system faces daily demands to host our children; it can't shut down to retool. Another is that education is big business, set in its ways. It is a livelihood for education bureaucrats, teachers, teachers' teachers, textbook publishers and school-builders.
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Using Writing In Mathematic on 2009-10-30
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Using Writing In
Mathematics
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This strand provides a developmental model for incorporating
writing into a math class. The strand includes specific suggestions
for managing journals, developing prompts for writing, and providing
students with feedback on their writing. In addition, the site
includes two sample lessons for introducing students to important
ideas related to writing about their mathematical thinking.
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Writing about thinking is challenging. For this reason, it's best
not to start out having students write about unfamiliar mathematical
ideas. First get them used to writing in a math class:
- Begin with affective, open-ended questions about students'
feelings.
Sample Direction #1: Reflect on your participation
in class today and complete the following statements:
- I learned that I...
- I was surprised that I...
- I noticed that I...
- I discovered that I...
- I was pleased that I...
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Sample Direction #2: Describe how you feel about
solving _________ problem. |
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Have students write a "mathography"-a paragraph or so in which
they describe their feelings about and experiences in math, both
in and out of school. (This is a good tool to get to know students
early in the year, and to make comparisons later when looking for
signs of progress.
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Find ways to keep students writing for the allotted time:
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Getting Students to Write about Familiar
Mathematical Ideas
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Once your students have become accustomed to writing about
their attitudes and feelings toward mathematics in their journals,
they are ready to write about simple, familiar math concepts. It is
important not to make the writing too difficult by asking them to
write about unfamiliar math ideas. Using writing to review familiar
math ideas will increase confidence and skill in writing as well as
revisit important math concepts.
Sample Directions:
- Explain in your own words what subtraction
means.
- Explain what is most important to understand about
fractions. |
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Use student writing samples to help them refine their writing.
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Introduce the term metacognition to help students understand
the reason and audience for their writing.
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When you feel your students are ready, ask them to write about
more complex mathematical ideas, including concepts being taught at
their current grade level. To help you move your students into this
more advanced level of writing about their thinking. Here are some
other suggestions to help you:
1. Encourage your students to use drawings and graphs to explain
their thinking.
- Research shows that using simple visual aids (diagrams,
graphs, etc.) improves mathematical problem-solving ability,
especially in female students. - Ask the group to write a summary of how they reached a
solution, including any "false starts" or "dead ends." - Ask each individual to write an explanation of the group's
work on a problem. Have the small groups discuss the individual
explanations. - After a small group assignment, have students "explain and
illustrate two different approaches to solving a problem."
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Blackboard’s Response to Open Source: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt on 2009-10-30
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Blackboard has not been having a good time in the state of North Carolina. As I noted recently, the University of North Carolina (a Blackboard customer) reported highly favorable results of their pilot study of Sakai, with an outcome of further investigation into Sakai as a full replacement of Blackboard as their primary LMS. It turns out that this was following on the heels of a
similar study done by the North Carolina Community College system favorably comparing Moodle to Blackboard. The details were different but some of the underlying dynamics were the same: the open source system in each case was found to be functionally equivalent to Blackboard for all practical purposes, the open source platforms did roughly as well as Blackboard (in the Moodle evaluation) or better than Blackboard (in the Sakai case) in usability evaluations, and Blackboard was deemed to be expensive relative to the alternatives.
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poor support was one of the major complaints about Blackboard in the original NCCCS report. It is important to remember that, just as software development under and open source license is not inherently inadequate for the needs of large institutions, neither is software developed under a proprietary license—even by a relatively large company like Blackboard—inherently adequate.
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It’s important to understand that open source projects are not inherently any more insecure than proprietary software development efforts.
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If Blackboard can’t help you fix your problems, you’re out of luck, because nobody else understands their code or has the right to look at it. If your Moodle vendor can’t help you, you can go to another vendor, or find another adopting school that knows how to fix the problem. You can also fix it yourself. You don’t have to, but unlike with Blackboard, you can. Likewise, if Blackboard were to go out of business (ask WebCT or ANGEL customers if this sort of thing ever happens), you would’t be able to find somebody else to support and continue to develop your platform. Not true with open source support vendors.
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Schools that have their systems hosted by Moodle vendors such as Moodlerooms or Remote Learner, or Sakai vendors such as Unicon or rSmart, have highly predictable costs with no additional staff required.
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the Moodle community includes some of the largest distance learning programs in the world, such as Open University UK and Open Polytechnic in New Zealand, not to mention many U.S. community colleges.
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With a proprietary product like Blackboard, just as with an open source community, development resources are going to go toward whatever projects that whoever controls the resources perceives to be in the interest of a critical mass of the adopting schools. Any proprietary company, including Blackboard, is obliged to prioritize functionality requests of a majority of the customers they happen to have, sometimes at the expense of the needs of a minority. The risks to adopting schools are therefore substantially the same.
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Blackboard provides the least transparency of any vendor or open source project in this product category. Their dismissal of the notion that an open source project could keep up with new innovations also rings hollow, and not just for LIS. If I recall correctly, Moodle also supported grading discussion posts long before Blackboard did, to cite one example of innovation that started in the open source LMSs and has been copied by Blackboard.
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NCCCS’s pilot and case studies found that Moodle’s usability is basically equal to Blackboard’s. UNC’s pilot studies found that Sakai’s usability is better than Blackboard’s.
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According to the NCCCS report, member schools went to Moodle in the first place because the high fees and poor customer service from Blackboard were creating costly resource distractions.
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Implementing performance assessment in the classroom. Brualdi, Amy on 2009-10-29
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Brualdi, Amy (1998). Implementing performance assessment in the classroom. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 6(2). Retrieved October 29, 2009 from http://PAREonline.net/getvn.asp?v=6&n=2 . This paper has been viewed 126,806 times since 11/13/1999.
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it is difficult to write
completion or multiple choice tests that go beyond the recall level.
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Performance-based assessments "represent a set of strategies for the . . .
application of knowledge, skills, and work habits through the performance of
tasks that are meaningful and engaging to students" (Hibbard and others, 1996,
p. 5). This type of assessment provides teachers with information about how a
child understands and applies knowledge. Also, teachers can integrate
performance-based assessments into the instructional process to provide
additional learning experiences for students.
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The benefit of performance-based assessments are well documented. However,
some teachers are hesitant to implement them in their classrooms. Commonly,
this is because these teachers feel they don't know enough about how to fairly
assess a student's performance (Airasian,1991). Another reason for reluctance
in using performance-based assessments may be previous experiences with them
when the execution was unsuccessful or the results were inconclusive (Stiggins,
1994). The purpose of this digest is to outline the basic steps that you can take to
plan and execute effective performance-based assessments.
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- What concept, skill, or knowledge am I trying to assess?
- What should my students know?
- At what level should my students be performing?
- What type of knowledge is being assessed: reasoning, memory, or
process (Stiggins, 1994)?
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There are some things that you must take into account
before you choose the activity: time constraints, availability of resources in the
classroom, and how much data is necessary in order to make an informed
decision about the quality of a student's performance (This consideration is
frequently referred to as sampling.).
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The literature distinguishes between two types of performance-based assessment
activities that you can implement in your classroom: informal and formal
(Airasian, 1991; Popham, 1995; Stiggins, 1994).
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When a student is being
informally assessed, the student does not know that the assessment is taking
place. As a teacher, you probably use informal performance assessments all the
time.
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A student who is being formally assessed knows that you are evaluating him/her.
When a student's performance is formally assessed, you may either have the
student perform a task or complete a project. You can either observe the student
as he/she performs specific tasks or evaluate the quality of finished products.
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You must beware that not all hands-on activities can be used as performance-based assessments (Wiggins, 1993). Performance-based assessments require
individuals to apply their knowledge and skills in context, not merely completing
a task on cue.
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- Identify the overall performance or task to be assessed, and perform it
yourself or imagine yourself performing it - List the important aspects of the performance or product.
- Try to limit the number of performance criteria, so they can all be observed
during a pupil's performance. - If possible, have groups of teachers think through the important behaviors
included in a task. - Express the performance criteria in terms of observable pupil behaviors or
product characteristics. - Don't use ambiguous words that cloud the meaning of the performance
criteria. - Arrange the performance criteria in the order in which they are likely to be
observed.
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allow your students to participate in this process
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asking the students to name the elements of the project/task that they
would use to determine how successfully it was completed (Stix, 1997).
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A rubric is a rating system by which teachers can determine at what level of
proficiency a student is able to perform a task or display knowledge of a concept.
With rubrics, you can define the different levels of proficiency for each criterion.
Like the process of developing criteria, you can either utilize previously
developed rubrics or create your own. When using any type of rubric, you need to
be certain that the rubrics are fair and simple. Also, the performance at each
level must be clearly defined and accurately reflect its corresponding criterion (or
subcategory)
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As with criteria development, allowing your students to assist in the creation of
rubrics may be a good learning experience for them. You can engage students in
this process by showing them examples of the same task performed/project
completed at different levels and discuss to what degree the different elements of
the criteria were displayed. However, if your students do not help to create the
different rubrics, you will probably want to share those rubrics with your
students before they complete the task or project.
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- Checklist Approach When you use this, you only have to indicate
whether or not certain elements are present in the performances. - Narrative/Anecdotal Approach When teachers use this, they will
write narrative reports of what was done during each of the
performances. From these reports, teachers can determine how well
their students met their standards. - Rating Scale Approach When teachers use this, they indicate to
what degree the standards were met. Usually, teachers will use a
numerical scale. For instance, one teacher may rate each criterion
on a scale of one to five with one meaning "skill barely present" and
five meaning "skill extremely well executed." - Memory Approach When teachers use this, they observe the
students performing the tasks without taking any notes. They use
the information from their memory to determine whether or not the
students were successful. (Please note that this approach is not
recommended.)
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teachers may wish to allow students to assess them themselves. Permitting
students to do this provides them with the opportunity to reflect upon the
quality of their work and learn from their successes and failures.
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VOISE Academy High School - Virtual Opportunities Inside a School Environment on 2009-10-29
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Q&A: iNACOL's Susan Patrick on Trends in eLearning -- THE Journal on 2009-10-29
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Q&A: iNACOL's Susan Patrick on Trends in eLearning
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At last count, there were more than 1 million enrollments in K-12 online schools in the United States. And according to
recent research, the number of students taking courses online will jump to more than 10 million in the next five years.
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iNACOL, the International Association for K-12 Online Learning. iNACOL is an advocacy and research organization that focuses on issues in K-12 online schooling. It represents a broad spectrum of groups centered around education, including schools themselves, state and local education agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, and various technology and content providers. Just this month, iNacol released the first-ever standards for K-12 online education programs,
National Standards for Quality Online Programs.
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The first online programs in K-12 education really started in the mid-1990s. Florida Virtual School and Kentucky Virtual School started in 1996. By 2000, there were about 40,000 enrollments in K-12 online learning--the estimate's between 40,000 and 50,000 enrollments nationwide. By 2002, there were 300,000 enrollments in K-12 online learning. By 2005, there were 500,000 enrollments. And the last data that came out last year shows that in 2007 there were more than a million enrollments in K-12 online learning.
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For an innovation in K-12 education to grow that rapidly--it's growing at more than 30 percent annually--is remarkable
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National surveys show that more than 40 percent of middle and high school students want to take an online course.
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The No. 1 reason for a school district to offer an online course is that the course is otherwise unavailable.
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There are major teacher shortages of math and science [teachers] all over the country, [as well as teachers of] foreign languages.... Forty percent of high schools do not offer AP classes.
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The second thing is it's really helping to meet the individual needs of students. The traditional model of education is to line 30 kids up in a classroom and teach one way--through lecture--to all of those students with one single textbook. Online learning allows a level of customization and personalization that is otherwise really impossible because of time constraints and capital constraints.
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[it] is allowing a level of personalization, of flexibility [that's really] allowing students to go deeper than they ever have before.
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Online learning is the solution for extending learning time....
The Silent Epidemic study [from] the Gates Foundation [showed] 88 percent of [dropouts] had passing grades and could have finished, but they're dropping out because they're disenfranchised. They feel like they're not challenged. They wish classes were more rigorous. If we keep doing the same thing and just hold them in school for longer hours, to me that doesn't make any sense.
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taking students only from the neighborhood [in which the graduation rate was] only 40 percent, taking those students and retraining teachers to use online courses and and all of these collaboration and discussion tools. In a traditional class, it's not cool in their neighborhood to raise their hand and have a lot of discussion, so they're doing these ... silent chats, silent discussions, where they're taking the online coursework and having discussions. The teachers think it's amazing because instead of just having one kid raise their hand, they've got 15 different students posting and sharing ideas and making it relevant to their world, and they're getting so much deeper. After the first year, they've got more than 80 percent of their kids on track for graduating on time and getting accepted to college.
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It's a redesign of the instructional strategy and a redesign of the curriculum away from "stand and deliver" in a single textbook to [focusing on] what ... you really need to do to engage these students and make them active learners who want to be successful in their own lives.
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The two biggest issues are the funding and the licensure.... It's really the adults learning what online learning is. There's still this misconception in K-12 education that there's a computer screen teaching your student, not that you're connected to a teacher that's leading discussion, that's monitoring your homework, that's doing some live, interactive sessions with you on a whiteboard.
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A lot of counselors understand intuitively that when a student is advanced and [wants] to take an AP course, they're comfortable with that. But the opportunities for credit recovery for struggling students to have this more personalized dynamic interaction, a lot of people don't understand how helpful it can be.
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it really comes down to [policymakers adopting] a broader perspective of what's possible in the 21st century.
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through online learning, K-12 teachers have opportunities to teach one course part-time or be adjunct faculty members or teach full-time and switch their load up so they teach some classes online and some classes face to face.
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There's a study called
Going Virtual! that shows that the average teacher going online has more than seven years of experience. A lot of people left the classroom with all of those years of experience because [of] the environment they were in--a lack of leadership support, whatever reason they left for--are applying at virtual schools, getting retrained to teach online, and then love that added flexibility that they have.
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Susan Lowes at Columbia University did some
research on this and showed that [K-12 teachers are] bringing those technology tools and the new strategies using the Internet back into their face-to-face classes, and it's actually improving the overall teaching and their skill sets and how they can do discussions different ways.
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[based on] the work from the
National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, we lose 30 percent of our new teachers within three years and 50 percent of our new teachers within five years in K-12 education. I wouldn't say that the virtual school teachers' retention rates are any worse than that.
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Taking a really great teacher and then giving them a bunch of technology tools so that that same group of students can do more is fine. But making fundamental shifts in access and teacher quality and how we design education to me is a lot more interesting.
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If you train somebody how to fully teach online, then they can use those skills in a classroom or virtually.
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if our digital investments are really underutilized, we really need to look at ways that can profoundly change the learning environment and make sure that those investments are sound.
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The sunken costs of technology in higher ed also support online learning. That's ubiquitous high-speed broadband. Eighty-three percent of college classes use a learning management system, whether they're face to face or otherwise. And that training for the faculty to use that learning management system--even to post their syllabus or assignments or other things like that--[is] really the first step in that direction. Whereas the sunken costs in school districts and states on technology don't always support virtual learning. You have to find a whole new pocket of money. And to me there's a real disconnect there.
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Teacher shortages are a major problem. It is a solution for teacher shortages, changing the distribution of teachers.
Engagement is a huge problem for students in the current model. Dynamic online courses and curriculum and training teachers in new strategies to improve that engagement and personalize instruction: [online learning] is a huge solution for that.
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Omaha Public Schools just switched all of their credit recovery and remediation in summer schools into online format. They're ... using
MITE open courseware to do that. So those are some solutions to major problems that are happening in our schools.
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There are huge opportunities in connecting students globally.... The
International Baccalaureate program, which is one of our members, they have started an IB diploma program online, and they have students from 125 different countries participating, collaborating, sharing ideas, communicating, building their second language fluency. Giving kids opportunities that are truly globally connected and academic in nature, I think, is so important in the world that we live in.
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There's a study called the Florida TaxWatch Report on the Florida Virtual School [downloadable in PDF form
here, approx. 800 KB] that compared all the data both for the AP courses and for the end of course exams in Florida and found that Florida Virtual School, through their online courses, was serving a higher number of minority and underserved students than traditional schools, and those students were performing better on the AP exams than traditional students in traditional schools and better on end of course exams.
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The study found the average AP exam score for FLVS students was 3.05 versus 2.49 for public school students. FCAT reading and math results were also markedly better for FLVS students than for public school students. Complete details and caveats can be found in the
report itself.]
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Every major study that's been done has shown that online learning is "as good as or better" when based on student achievement. And
this last report that ... came out of the Department of Ed [early this summer] shows that it's better. And considering that kids wouldn't have access to these classes anyway, even if they were just as good, that would be a huge step in the right direction. But the fact that they're actually academically more engaging and better is a real sign that we can learn things and shift things.
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Q&A: iNACOL's Susan Patrick on Trends in eLearning -- THE Journal on 2009-10-29
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At last count, there were more than 1 million enrollments in K-12 online schools in the United States. And according to
recent research, the number of students taking courses online will jump to more than 10 million in the next five years.
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Susan Patrick, president and CEO of
iNACOL, the International Association for K-12 Online Learning. iNACOL is an advocacy and research organization that focuses on issues in K-12 online schooling. It represents a broad spectrum of groups centered around education, including schools themselves, state and local education agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, and various technology and content providers. Just this month, iNacol released the first-ever standards for K-12 online education programs,
National Standards for Quality Online Programs.
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The first online programs in K-12 education really started in the mid-1990s. Florida Virtual School and Kentucky Virtual School started in 1996. By 2000, there were about 40,000 enrollments in K-12 online learning--the estimate's between 40,000 and 50,000 enrollments nationwide. By 2002, there were 300,000 enrollments in K-12 online learning. By 2005, there were 500,000 enrollments. And the last data that came out last year shows that in 2007 there were more than a million enrollments in K-12 online learning.
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For an innovation in K-12 education to grow that rapidly--it's growing at more than 30 percent annually--is remarkable
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National surveys show that more than 40 percent of middle and high school students want to take an online course.
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