Tracy Tuten's List: Projects

• 7 Out of 10 Employers Reject Job Candidates Based on Social Media
• Their findings: 9 out of 10 employers report using social media to screen prospective employees. 7 out of 10 report rejecting candidates based on their social media presences—and roughly the same number report accepting candidates based on their social media presences, too.

• MGM Chief Executive Jim Murren at casino industry
• Among hospitality companies, Marriott International Inc. has created an online game that allows players to manage a virtual hotel restaurant. Marriott's game is designed to be an employee recruiting tool rather than for acquiring customers.

• "The demographics of [online] gamers are really right in the strike zone of the gaming industry," Mr. Murren said, pointing to the connection between non-gambling gamers and gamblers.

   

  MGM is also among several large casino companies pushing hard for Internet gambling to become legal in the U.S.

1 more annotation...

• In an oft-cited survey [pdf] released by Microsoft Research in 2010, 70% of recruiters said they’d rejected applicants based on info they found online.

• Like content strategy, thought leadership is a relatively new option for companies that want to improve their visibility and connections online in ways that prompt sales leads to come to you.

   

  But thought leadership is, much more than content strategy, subject to the Bill Joy rule, which says that most smart people in the world don't work for your company.

   

  How, then, do you possibly develop a thought leadership strategy?

   

  If you get your thought leadership strategy right, customers will see you as a go-to source of expertise, your new products or incremental improvements will find easier acceptance, you'll stand a good chance of bolstering product price (which is critical in many industries where commoditization is at work), and you'll attract talent more easily.

   

  Inevitably, some companies will get it wrong, so in this article I will outline why that happens, how to avoid the major mistakes companies make, and what to do to excel in thought leadership.

• Criteria for a Meaningful Classroom Assessment

    

  To address these requirements, I ask myself the following guided questions:

    
  1. Does the assessment involve project-based learning?
    
  2. Does it allow for student choice of topics?
    
  3. Is it inquiry based?
    
  4. Does it ask that students use some level of internet literacy to find their answers?
    
  5. Does it involve independent problem solving?
    
  6. Does it incorporate the 4Cs?
    
  7. Do the students need to communicate their knowledge via writing in some way?
    
  8. Does the final draft or project require other modalities in its presentation? (visual, oral, data, etc...)

• So how can high-stakes assessments be meaningful to students? For one thing, high-stakes tests shouldn't be so high-stakes. It's inauthentic. They should and still can be a mere snapshot of ability. Additionally, those occasional assessments need to take a back seat to the real learning and achievement going on in every day assessments observed by the teacher.

    

  The key here, however, is to assess everyday. Not in boring, multiple-choice daily quizzes, but in informal, engaging assessments that take more than just a snapshot of a student's knowledge at one moment in time.

    

  But frankly, any assessment that sounds cool can still be made meaningless. It's how the students interact with the test that makes it meaningful. Remember the 4 Cs and ask this: does the assessment allow for:

    

  Creativity Are they students creating or just regurgitating? Are they being given credit for presenting something other than what was described?

    

  Collaboration Have they spent some time working with others to formulate their thoughts, brainstorm, or seek feedback from peers?

    

  Critical Thinking Are the students doing more work than the teacher in seeking out information and problem solving?

    

  Communication Does the assessment emphasize the need to communicate the content well? Is there writing involved as well as other modalities? If asked to teach the content to other students, what methods will the student use to communicate the information and help embed it more deeply?
• Another way to ensure that an assessment is meaningful, of course, is to simply ask the students what they thought. Design a survey after each major unit or assessment. Or, better yet, if you want to encourage students to really focus on the requirements on a rubric, add a row that's only for them to fill out for you. That way, the rubric's feedback is more of a give-and-take, and you get feedback on the assessment's level of meaningfulness as soon as possible.
• Download the example (left) of a quick rubric I designed for a general writing assessment. I included a row that the participants could fill out that actually gave me quick feedback on how meaningful or helpful they believed the assessment was towards their own learning.

2 more annotations...