Two high schools in Minnesota are using Pearson Education's WriteToLearn to help students build literacy skills and prepare for the new Minnesota writing assessment.

The schools are Dunwoody Academy High School, a new technical charter school in north Minneapolis administered by Dunwoody College, and Robbinsdale Cooper High School, part of the Robbinsdale Area Schools in New Hope, Minn.

With WriteToLearn, students practice essay writing and summarization skills, and their efforts are measured by a "Knowledge Analysis Technologies" (KAT) engine. The KAT engine is an automated assessment technology that evaluates the meaning of text by examining whole passages, not just grammatical correctness or spelling.

"WriteToLearn is an awesome program that gives each student feedback right away, which is something a teacher cannot possibly have time to do," said Duane Dutrieuille, dean of academic and student affairs at Dunwoody Academy High School.

Provide rich multimedia resources

As any educator quickly discovers, the surest way to learn something yourself is to teach it to others. Students, who produce multimedia projects designed to teach something to others, have worked through the content at a much higher level and will retain much more than those who have been simply taught the content. The higher level of understanding and retention is a result of having interacted with the same content from four different perspectives:

• as researchers, students must locate and select the information and resources necessary to understand the concept
  
• as authors, students must consider the intended audience and decide what type and amount of information is necessary to teach the concept to their intended audience
  
• as designers, students must select the most appropriate media to share their content and decide how to structure their material to communicate it effectively
  
• as producers, students must think carefully about how they can use the media's capabilities and features to represent their content and then they must interact extensively with the material as they build the final product
  

Additional benefits flow from such project based learning. Not only have students mastered the content, they have also practiced 21st century skills such as communication, self-direction, and problem-solving. Many students are also highly motivated because they are creating something for a wider audience than the audience-of-one-teacher a traditional term paper is written for.

To create effective multimedia projects, students and teachers will need access to a rich storehouse of information and multimedia elements. The Internet can provide much of what is needed. State agencies and other institutions can also contribute by building repositories of copyright-free artifacts and other learning objects that can be freely used by students and teachers alike.

Guiding principle: Students and teachers must have access to rich multimedia resources to:

• extend their world and life experiences
  
• engage their senses
  
• incorporate into their own multimedia projects
  
• provide building blocks of instruction

Back to the book analogy, its as if the book will not open and let itself be read unless you can prove to the publisher that you are keeping the book in a locked room so no one else will ever read it.  And it is Microsoft who has enabled this, by providing the the tools to do so in their operating system.  Remember the fallout from Sony putting spyware, err copy protection, in their CD's -- turns out that that event was just a dress rehearsal for Windows Vista.

As Rosoff's statement implies, many of Vista's DRM technologies exist not
because Microsoft wanted them there; rather, they were developed at the behest
of movie studios, record labels and other high-powered intellectual property
owners.

"Microsoft was dealing here with a group of companies that simply don't trust
the hardware [industry]," Rosoff said. "They wanted more control and more
security than they had in the past" -- and if Microsoft failed to accommodate
them, "they were prepared to walk away from Vista" by withholding support for
next-generation DVD formats and other high-value content.

Microsoft's official position is that Vista's DRM capabilities serve users by
providing access to high-quality content that rights holders would otherwise
serve only at degraded quality levels, if they chose to serve them at all. "In
order to achieve that content flow, appropriate content-protection measures must
be in place that create incentives for content owners while providing consumers
the experiences they want and have grown to expect,"

Nope, no arrogance here.

Matt Rosoff, lead analyst at research firm Directions On Microsoft, asserts that
this process does not bode well for new content formats such as Blu-ray and
HD-DVD, neither of which are likely to survive their association with DRM
technology. "I could not be more skeptical about the viability of the DRM
included with Vista, from either a technical or a business standpoint," Rosoff
stated. "It's so consumer-unfriendly that I think it's bound to fail -- and when
it fails, it will sink whatever new formats content owners are trying to
impose."

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