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A great article in EDUCAUSE about creating activities students actually find useful.

Performance assessment, also known as alternative or authentic assessment, is a form of testing that requires students to perform a task rather than select an answer from a ready-made list. For example, a student may be asked to explain historical events, generate scientific hypotheses, solve math problems, converse in a foreign language, or conduct research on an assigned topic. Experienced raters--either teachers or other trained staff--then judge the quality of the student's work based on an agreed-upon set of criteria. This new form of assessment is most widely used to directly assess writing ability based on text produced by students under test instructions

I found this article helpful by dispelling the myth of teaching math with online and tech tools. I keep getting resistance and some of it is mine.

tools and constructivism

Love that the "practical descriptions of constructivist learning" listed in the article "[C]onstructivist learning should engage students in meaningful learning and ... the critical features are that the learning should be ... * Active and manipulative, engaging students in interactions and explorations with learning materials and provid[ing] opportunities for them to observe the results of their manipulations * Constructive and reflective, enabling students to integrate new ideas with prior knowledge to make meaning and enable learning through reflection * Intentional, providing opportunities for students to articulate their learning goals and monitor their progress in achieving them * Authentic, challenging and real-world (or simulated), facilitating better understanding and transfer of learning to new situations * Cooperative, collaborative, and conversational, providing students with opportunities to interact with each other to clarify and share ideas, to seek assistance, to negotiate problems, and discuss solutions."

For those interested in mathematics reform, Dan Meyer provides a strong case for a more genuine mathematics in the classroom. You might also check out the article "A Mathematician's Lament" for a discussion on how the beautiful art form of mathematics is desecrated in the classroom: http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdfhttp://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

According to ACTFL, foreign language learners need as much as 240+ hours of input to reach an intermediate level of proficiency. I'm looking into ways to use Twitter together with other applications like Feedly to encourage students to become autonomous learners and get more input from authentic francophone listening and reading sources. I can help them navigate through the sea of information available by sending them my suggested feeds and then practice using the target language by discussing topics together. Feedly is used to create a personal list of RSS feeds to favorite online news, video, audio and learning sources and save, publish and/or share them with others via an RSS reader application or even Twitter.

This is a good Wiki for World Language teachers in order to start planning for teaching and learning using ACTFL Standards.