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chris deason

A Brief Guide for Selecting and Using Pre-Post Assessments - 0 views

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    "NDTAC has developed a guide titled A Brief Guide for Selecting and Using Pre-Post Assessments for State, agency, and/or facility administrators who provide education for children and youth who are neglected, delinquent, or at risk (N or D). The guide provides basic information about the ideal characteristics of a pre-post test and highlights important features to consider when requesting and evaluating information from test publishers. The guide is intended primarily as a resource for those who are in the process of choosing a new pre-post assessment or who wish to evaluate their current testing procedures. Although few tests will have all the characteristics of an ideal pre-post test, this guide should help administrators select and use an instrument that best meets the needs of their student population."
chris deason

The Bartleby Project - 1 views

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    ""The Bartleby Project begins by inviting 60,000,000 American students, one by one, to peacefully refuse to take standardized tests or to participate in any preparation for these tests; it asks them to act because adults chained to institutions and corporations are unable to; because these tests pervert education, are disgracefully inaccurate, impose brutal stresses without reason, and actively encourage a class system which is poisoning the future of the nation." Read John Taylor Gatto's full statement on the Bartleby Project (it's long)."
Andrew Barras

A 'Stealth Assessment' Turns to Video Games to Measure Thinking Skills - Technology - T... - 0 views

  • Colleges no longer simply want to know what their students know, but how they think.
  • Higher-order thinking skills are "something that schools are paying a little bit more attention to these days," says Jeffrey Steedle, a measurement scientist at the Council for Aid to Education, whose Collegiate Learning Assessment essays are used at several hundred colleges to test students' abilities to synthesize arguments and write persuasively. "It's largely in response to the recognition that these skills are needed to be competitive in the global marketplace."
  • But educators also say that paper-and-pencil examinations have limits—for one thing, knowing that you are being tested can drag down performance—and they are looking for new methods to measure skills like critical thinking, creativity, and persistence.
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  • Valerie J. Shute, an associate professor of educational psychology and learning systems at Florida State University, believes she has a solution in "stealth assessment"—the administering of tests without students' knowing.
  • To do that, Ms. Shute and other stealth-assessment researchers have turned to video games, which let educators watch students solve complex tasks while immersed in virtual worlds.
  • "Everybody likes to play," she says. "And so much could be done using games."
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    Great article about using video games to assess students
chris deason

Final Presentation Action Research Great Testament - 2 views

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    Maintaining student engagement within large lecture environments has never been an easy proposition. This 6-month study analyzed student surveys and test scores taken before and after the implementation of a variety of digital technologies designed to increase engagement and retention in lecture settings. While student responses indicated an appreciation for the inclusion of multimedia within daily lessons, this study found no statistical evidence that such resources increase student achievement. A review of the literature suggests that the lack of observable gains in student grades after implementation could be related to an uncoordinated deployment of said technologies. The author intends to repeat this analysis in the coming school year with a more considered deployment of multimedia and Internet based resources.
Andrew Barras

The Wild World of Massively Open Online Courses « Unlimited Magazine - 0 views

  • In a traditional university setting, a student pays to register for a course. The student shows up. A professor hands out an outline, assigns readings, stands at the front and lectures. Students take notes and ask questions. Then there is a test or an essay.
  • But with advancing online tools innovative educators are examining new ways to break out of this one-to-many model of education, through a concept called massively open online courses. The idea is to use open-source learning tools to make courses transparent and open to all, harnessing the knowledge of anyone who is interested in a topic.
  • George Siemens, along with colleague Stephen Downes, tried out the open course concept in fall 2008 through the University of Manitoba in a course called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, or CCK08 for short. The course would allow 25 students to register, pay and receive credit for the course. All of the course content, including discussion boards, course readings, podcasts and any other teaching materials, was open to anyone who had an internet connection and created a user profile.
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  • Course facilitators, Siemens and Downes, gave learners control over how they learned.
  • The concept was enough to lure in D’Arcy Norman
  • He was one of the 2,300 students who signed up for a free account that would allow him to access class documents, receive emails from the facilitators and participate in online class discussions.
  • Norman was one of the more passive participants, while others participated fully, doing all the reading and the assignments, without receiving recognized credit for their work. The instructors only marked papers and the final project from for-credit students, but others were free to post papers on the course website for other students to view and comment on.
  • “At the beginning, we had quite a number of students feeling quite overwhelmed because you would get 200 or 300 posts going into a discussion forum per day and that’s just about impossible to follow,” Siemens says.
  • “You have people in there who were really interested, but they were afraid to explore the technologies that were being used and they got lost,” Lane says.
  • Even if students in massively open online courses master the technology and overcome their virtual stage fright, a third problem remains: how to recognize the value of a learning experience that isn’t for credit.
  • “If you’re in a business and you’re a young professional and you want to take an open class, how do you get your superiors to respect that, and say ‘Wow, that’s really good professional development. We should put that in your personnel file,’” Lane questions. “If it’s open and everyone can drop in and drop out, it’s just not seen in the same way.”
  • Wend Drexler, a professor and grant administrator at the University of Florida who also took Siemen’s class as a for-credit student, says that as more professors are posting their content online, figuring out how to recognize non-credit learning will continue to be an issue.
  • “You could really piece together a good undergraduate education based on what’s available out there, but how do you prove to an employer that you have done that?” Drexler questions. “I don’t know, but it’s something that everyone is trying to work through.”
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    More details on MOOC
Andrew Barras

YouTube - Kodak 1922 Kodachrome Film Test - 0 views

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    One of the earliest color films in existance.
chris deason

edReformer: Register: Michael Horn "Disrupting Class" Live Chat - 0 views

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    Getting Started with Open Office .org 3: OpenOffice.org 3.0
Andrew Barras

Why We Switched to Sakai -- Campus Technology - 0 views

  • Pepperdine University has made the decision to adopt Sakai as the single, university-wide learning management system (LMS), effective Jan. 1, 2011.
  • because of the significant cost savings that will accrue as a result of this adoption, our decision highlights an approach for proactively dealing with the economic uncertainty arising from the "new normal" that now affects all higher education institutions.
  • Although the LMS often comprises the "third rail" of our technology services, a very large majority of our faculty and students not only support this change, but are applauding it.
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  • Five findings led to our decision:
  • Our research suggests that the potential of the LMS to transform teaching and learning is diminishing quickly. While the LMS is vitally important, in the same sense that commodity services such as e-mail, bandwidth, and disk storage are, the LMS by itself can no longer be considered strategic. Rather, it is the mash-up of different types of collaborative technologies, such as blogs, tweets, wikis, social networking sites, online media, and document sharing systems, together with the LMS, that appears to have the greater potential to transform our technology and learning practices.
  • The LMS is important, but is no longer transformative
  • Students prefer Sakai
  • As a part of our planning process, beginning in the summer of 2009, Pepperdine began running Sakai in parallel with our existing LMS.
  • Greater numbers of student respondents preferred Sakai over our current LMS when comparing the following features: announcements, assignments, gradebooks, resources (course materials), forums, calendars, quizzes and tests, dropboxes, and blogs.
  • So do our faculty
  • Faculty respondents preferred Sakai to our current LMS when comparing the following features: assignments, gradebooks, resources (course materials), forums, calendars, and dropboxes.
  • Our IT staff members find Sakai much easier to support
  • Overall, our IT staff finds that supporting Sakai is a remarkable improvement over our current LMS.
  • The financial savings is equivalent to the salaries of two faculty members
  • Our planning process involved the participation of hundreds of faculty and students, required presentations at dozens of meetings, and necessitated buy-in from our faculty and approval by the provost and deans. Serving as a change advocate regarding the effective delivery and use of technology, particularly in the technology and learning space, is an increasingly important role for our IT organization.
  • My words of advice for other IT leaders contemplating similar initiatives include the following:
  • Don't shy away from this type of challenge: Lead
  • Let faculty be your advocates
  • Use data to break the ice with difficult change initiatives
  • resistance to LMS change efforts is often based on closely held myths that sometimes fall apart under scrutiny. Properly used benchmarks and other measures are effective tools in any change initiative.
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    Good article about changing LMS technologies
chris deason

Study Island - Leading Provider of K-12 Online Standards-Based Educational Software Lea... - 0 views

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    "# Web-based instruction, practice, assessment and reporting built from YOUR state's standards # Rigorous academic content that is both fun and engaging # Research-based with proven results for all students # Easy to use (in the lab, classroom, library or home) # Incredibly affordable compared to other print or technology learning products"
Andrew Barras

Needed: A New Model of Pedagogy : : Don Tapscott - 0 views

  • The film Waiting for Superman
  • argues that teachers are at the center of the problem and that the solution is charter schools.
  • But it’s wrong to blame teachers, who are usually a) underpaid, and b) striving to do the best with the limited resources they are given. Nor does the research show that charter schools achieve better outcomes.  The root of the malaise in our schools is the outmoded model of pedagogy.  Teachers and text books are assumed to be the source of knowledge.  Teachers “teach” – they impart knowledge to their students, who through practice and assignments learn how to perform well on tests.
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  • This is the very best model of pedagogy that 18th century technology can provide.  It’s teacher-centered model that is one way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. It’s time for a rethinking of the entire model of learning.  We need to move to a customized and collaborative model that embraces 21st century learning technology and techniques.  This is not about technology per se – it’s about a change in the relationship between the student and teacher in the learning process.
  • Are we willing to accept that an Industrial Age form of education isn’t much good for children who have to work in a digital age?
  • Portugal launched the biggest program in the world to equip every child in the country with a laptop and access to the web and the world of collaborative learning. To pay for it, Portugal tapped into both government funds and money from mobile operators who were granted 3G licenses. That subsidized the sale of one million ultra-cheap laptops to teachers, school children, and adult learners.
  • The impact on the classroom is tremendous, as I saw this spring when I toured a classroom of seven-year-olds in a public school in Lisbon. It was the most exciting, noisy, collaborative classroom I have seen in the world.
  • too often, in the American and Canadian school system, teachers still rely on the traditional model of education. Teachers often feel that this is the only way to teach a large classroom of kids, and yet the classroom in Portugal shows that giving kids laptops can free the teacher to introduce a new way of learning that’s more natural for kids who have grown up digital at home.
  • First, it allows teachers to step off the stage and start listening and conversing instead of just lecturing. Second, the teacher can encourage students to discover for themselves, and learn a process of discovery and critical thinking instead of just memorizing the teacher’s information. Third, the teacher can encourage students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the school. Finally, the teacher can tailor the style of education to their students’ individual learning styles.
  • simply providing computers in schools is not enough. Teachers facing a classroom of kids with laptops need to learn that they are no longer the expert in their domain; the Internet is.
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    Fantastic article about 1:1 classrooms
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