Group items tagged

Guideline 1:! Relate grades to the achievement of the district's course/grade level standards. Guideline 2:! Use agreed-on performance standards as the reference points when determining grades. Guideline 3:! Separate achievement from all other dispositions and behaviors. Guideline 4:! Sample student performance. ! Don't score everything & don't include all scores in grades. Guideline 5:! Grade in pencil and maintain records so they can be easily updated. Guideline 6:! To determine grades at the end of the grading period, use professional judgment when considering the body of evidence. Grading must involve more than just crunching numbers. Guideline 7:! Use quality assessments and properly record evidence of achievement. Guideline 8:! Involve students in the assessment and grading processes throughout the learning cycle. No zeros for missing or incomplete work At Middle school: "Student work in the Lesson Practice & Progress Checks portion will be recorded as Missing (M) in the grade book if a student does not turn in an assignment. Middle school students will have until the end of the quarter to complete these practice activities or the Missing (M) will remain. The Missing (M) will factor into the overall average as a zero. However, leaving the Missing (M) in the grade book will communicate that the work has not been turned in. And, because the Lesson Practice & Progress Checks portion of the grade book is weighted just 20% of the overall grade, the Missing (M) for the practice work will not have significant impact on the student's grade." At High School: "A score of zero will not be entered in the grade book. Instead, M or I will be entered to indicate that work is not yet complete. In grades 9-12, students will have five days beyond the assignment due date to complete Lesson Practice and Progress Checks, unless there are extenuating circumstances. An M (Missing) will be entered in the grade book until the work is turned in or until the end of the nine-w

"Zeros are seldom an accurate description of a student's achievement and skew average grades dramatically. Instead of prompting greater effort, zeros and the low grades they yield more often cause students to withdraw from learning. One alternative to zeros is to assign an "I" or "Incomplete" grade with explicit requirements for completing the work." .... "If the grade is to represent how well students have learned, mastered established learning standars, or achieved specified learning goals, then the practice of assigning zeros clearly misses the mark." **"Teachers must consider what message they want to communicate through grading, who the primary audience for the message is, and what the intended goal of the communication is." ...

"Google Forms are amazing tools, allowing you to do some really advanced tricks with forms as the front-end and spreadsheets at the heart. Once you get started you'll be amazed at just how much you can achieve with this basic premise. Today we'll look at how to create a self-grading quiz using Google Forms. From there, you'll no doubt find a lot more ways to use forms and spreadsheets"

Powerful argument about saying no to the zero grade

Marzano always has great info, especially with grading.

Something to look into for quick grading using your doc cam

"The mission of ePALS Classroom Exchange is to offer safe, innovative ways for learners to make contact with other cultures. They currently connect over 4.5 million users from 191 countries, speaking 136 languages, by providing built-in Webmail language translation and safety features such as monitored e-mail and profanity filters. All of the tools and resources on the site are free to anyone with a computer, anywhere in the world. The site also offers collaborative projects that students can join, as well as tools for creating projects and contacting students in remote locations."

ePals is the social network optimized for K-12 learning. Over half a million classrooms in 200 countries and territories have joined the ePals Global Community to connect, collaborate and exchange ideas. ePals now translates in 35 languages! The benefits of the site are that the students can connect with other students and classrooms around the globe. You connect with them by the projects that you are working on in the classroom. This gives the common ground to talk about back and forth. The possible pitfalls are if you get a classroom that is not as involved as yours. It could be a let down and you may have to find another classroom that you could connect with.

This site is free and connects you with other educators seeking to connect classrooms for global projects. It has great safety features and has a variety of projects for all content areas and grade levels. You can form e-mail pen pal connections with classrooms around the world. Very cool!

The Global Classroom Project wiki is a collection of resources for teachers who want to collaborate globally. There are several big ongoing projects for all grade levels, as well as a huge directory of teachers you can contact on your own if you want to find a collaborator for a project.

Parent guides for supporting Common Core Standards for ELA, individualized for each grade level, K-HS (cick on left sidebar for math)

The Student Blogging Challenge for spring is starting in March. Here's wehre you can register your class. Note, ECE is preschool-1st grade; LP is lower primary which we call Primary; UP is upper primary which we call Elementary. =) Their Aussie terms are a little different than ours. For more info on the challenge, visit http://studentchallenge.edublogs.org/

I love this idea of having the PBL measurable -- not only a PSA, and an action step, but MEASURING the changes in behaviors/beliefs through tangible measurements. (Makes me think about Kirkpatrick)... It also makes me think about how this is a great CommonCore unit too! I would love to see an authentic school-wide (or grade level) PBL. How innovative would that be? While also causing us to behave as a PLC.

This is one of the things we need to model for our students (older grades)

science, technology, research, engineering, arts, and math Can search by grade level: K-5; 6-8; 9-12 Can search by topic: biomedical tributary; engineering tributary; logistics, manufacturing and construction; architecture, digital media arts and tech; 3nergy, emerging sciences and math; agriculture, plant and animal science

"Field trips" using Google Earth to show locations in well-known literature, all grades. Awesome for teaching about setting.

National Geographic and Annenberg are offering a week-long course on water (Oct 9-16), the first in a series of online courses that extend through CEM and beyond, with credit available from the University of San Diego. "Description: Water is an essential theme in social studies, science, and geography. Whether teaching about natural or human systems, water is part of the story. This open online course, framed around California's Education and the Environment Initiative (EEI), focuses on ocean and freshwater topics and strategies for teaching environmental topics in Grades 4-8. Resources and support are provided for how to use EEI to implement Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy."

This year our coaching experiences ranged from nervous anticipation to almost feeling like we knew what we were doing. The redeeming facet of our task was that so many of our peers benefited from the collaborative efforts from each house/team, the grade level, and throughout the school. As a result, our students have demonstrated amazing academic results. Please see the website to learn more about our perspectives from this school year.

It is refreshing to know that others felt the same way I felt when beginning this collaboration journey. The nervous anticipation was there as well as a feeling of dread because of the unknown. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

I love how everyone contributed something different to your Chronicles. It really showcased all the resources that are out there to fit every personality and teaching style. Your presentation showed that the collaboration process works! I love the animation---I'm going to have to try that.

Students will research, write, edit, revise, support, and publish their news stories and editorial opinion pieces-while learning, practicing, and mastering 21st century content standards, learning objectives, learning skills, and technology tools.Students will be publishing them in a 21st century, globally-themed newspaper format. This newspaper can be shared with not only the school but the community. This is a lesson for 4th grade, but I think it could be adapted for 3rd grade up.

Grade/Subject: 9-12 Language Arts Description: Students will research the American Dream, what it means to different people and cultures, how it changes, and how it manifests itself in politics, religion, education or entertainment. In addition, students will define their own American Dreams and explore obstacles and adjustments they might need to make. Benefits: The student will apply pre-reading skills and comprehension strategies, while extending independent reading, and will organize and synthesize information that will be used to plan, create, organize and present an age appropriate media product. Students will also become more aware of the way culture changes across the decades. Possible Pitfalls: Finding an authentic audience could be an issue. However, some front work could solve that problem.

An Index of US Military Support Web Sites Good for all grade levels Real World activities that will benefit soldiers Great project for requiring the students to organize, plan, execute a real world project Pitfall- teacher would have to okay the project to make sure that it is something that is grade level appropriate or that the project doesn't require a fee.

Project Densho The Densho Educational Web site gives students access to a wealth of primary source material relating to the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Project Densho's partnership with historians at Stanford University produced curriculum to help students and teachers use these valuable resources in classroom activities. This is a powerful tool to bring inquiry-based learning into middle and high school social studies classrooms. This is a powerful site for inquiry-based learning for upper grades; however, there isn't anything already created that we can enroll our classes in... unless it's there and I'm missing it.