thought someone might be interested in assessment

Wow!

This is just brilliant!

This is an important article about our education system.  I think the paragraph about "drive-by" professional development gets at what I was speaking of last night.  Budgets for teacher professional development are rapidly decreasing, and we are being forced to learn on our own time with our own dollars.  This is why I'm so insistent upon "learning to learn."  My hope is that you all get the opportunity to work in an environment where your professional development is valued and encouraged.

This is the link I shared in the session last night with tools divided by type.

There are conversations going on all over about the video of the bullying victim who fought back. It's also interesting to read the comments on this interview.

If you haven't tried Evernote, I highly recommend it. This is a decent post about uses in education.

I like that I can sync evernote across multiple machines and my phone. My 10 year old daughter even uses it to capture things she wants to save.

Wow! You've got some very useful feedback in here. I appreciate the time you've taken to pull this together. It's been a lot of fun, and I've certainly learned a lot from all of you!

This is a guide from Northern AZ U. I'm not a huge fan of rubrics for assessment, but I think they can sometimes help students get an idea of your expectations. If you can implement them without stifling creativity, they might be useful to you.

I think this course is a good example of how rubrics can fall short. We've got a small group of students with very diverse experience. You all want and need something very different from this course. Your projects should all be different. While I can give you some idea of expectations, it's difficult to plan in advance for your audience and still provide the individualized learning necessary in some disciplines and courses.

I was able to watch some of this while it streamed live. It's worth watching the recording if you have time. "Tune in to this rare opportunity to see the "best living historian of education" (Washington Post) and America's "soberest, most history-minded education expert" (Wall Street Journal), give one of the best-informed analyses of the current state of American education-what's broken and what are the best ways to fix it. Diane Ravitch is a research professor of education at New York University, senior fellow at Brookings Institution, renowned education historian, and author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010). Her book, which takes issue with both the political right and left, has been called a "must read" for education policymakers at all levels of government."

This is worth checking out if you're teaching K-12. Actually, it's pretty interesting for higher ed, as well, but designed for K-12. I was around when they originally started building it, and it's been fun to watch it evolve. Good people on this project!

An interesting blog post about a change in how we manage online courses and research at an institution.

My friend Chris Lott shared this with me to pair with the reddit illness posting.  Important stuff to know when you're dealing with online communities.

This was shared by professor Alec Couros on Twitter this morning.  skim through the comments and see how many people are responding to help this person have a virtual world tour before they pass.  It's certainly interesting to observe. Of course, you never know if this is a truthful post, but it's interesting to see how it is handled by online society.

Here's a map of the responses. http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=214113702736779726260.00049dc8a7f15e97c9544&z=2

And an interesting response to it all. https://img.skitch.com/20110306-njsrk6k5wk8kjesmsf87hc8s6.jpg

Check out what Howard Rheingold is up to now. He's offering free tuition to 2 librarians, people who help out with the wiki maintenance.

If you're not already familiar with this, you may want to search for some articles about it. Andy Carvin, from NPR, has been collecting and redistributing "tweets" of people involved in important world protests and revolutions right now. He also sends tweets asking for translations of video and audio that aren't in English. People translate and send them back to him. It's really quite incredible. He's also just a nice guy. He's sacrificing a lot of his personal time to do this. Occasionally he posts about his family and other things he's doing.

There's certainly bias in this post, and it's political, but I think it's important for us all to be aware of what's going on in budget cuts to education. It's a complex issue, but one that affects our entire society, not just people with kids.

An example of a teacher who is using screencasts on her blog.

"In a few weeks, TED will be launching an online forum. We're calling it the TED-ED Brain Trust. We're seeking the expertise of visionary educators, students, organizations, filmmakers & other creative professionals to guide, galvanize & ultimately lead this exciting new initiative."