In this HASTAC forum, three Scholars invite you to consider evaluation and assessment in the face of new forms of digital media, new kinds of skills and technologies, and the ever-changing landscape of education and academia.
Grading 2.0: Evaluation in the Digital Age
As the educational and cultural climate changes in response to new technologies for creating and sharing information, educators have begun to ask if the current framework for assessing student work, standardized testing, and grading is incompatible with the way these students should be learning and the skills they need to acquire to compete in the information age. Many would agree that its time to expand the current notion of assessment and create new metrics, rubrics, and methods of measurement in order to ensure that all elements of the learning process are keeping pace with the ever-evolving world in which we live. This new framework for assessment might build off of currently accepted strategies and pedagogy, but also take into account new ideas about what learners should know to be successful and confident in all of their endeavors.
Teacher Guides: Can You Trust the News?
How to Teach Students to Recognize Good Journalism
Welcome, teachers!
Today's students are coming of age during unprecedented changes in how we consume news and information. They have access to worlds of knowledge other generations could hardly have imagined. In order to effectively use this knowledge and make well-informed decisions as citizens, they must first learn to be discerning about the information they consume. As educators, it's our responsibility to nurture critical thinking skills and a healthy skepticism to help them reach that goal - along with an appreciation for quality journalism.
By MATT RICHTEL
Published: November 21, 2010
The constant stream of stimuli offered by new technology poses a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.
Experimenting fearlessly is an important step in redesigning education and encouraging the development of 21st century skills.
Clay Burell is Korea's best kept secret, asking provocative questions about the changing nature of schooling. Jenny Luca is an Aussie dynamo, encouraging teachers to create meaningful service learning projects. Kevin Jarrett runs one of the most inventive elementary-level computer labs in New Jersey.
Wouldn't young adults truly prepared for the 21st century have experience using computers to learn with—rather than simply about—the world
Don't today's 12-year-olds need to recognize that future coworkers are just as likely to live on the other side of the world as on the other side of town?
This is a great point which is why worldwide collaboration in education is so important to pursue and engage in.
no one has taught them about the power of these connections
few are using those networks to pursue meaningful personal growth
Consider the potential: Students from different countries can explore global challenges together. Small cohorts of motivated kids can conduct studies of topics with deep personal meaning to them. Experts can "visit" classrooms thousands of miles away.
When does this education begin? Or, does it matter? The impulse of typing the "emotion of the moment" overides what the adolescent brain has been taught.
each conversation includes opportunities for students to ask questions and feel a push against their preconceived notions.
This sounds like such an awesome opportunity to encourage students to defend their thinking (which is something we want them to do) in a form where it doesn't feel like a teacher assignment
I began using discussion tools like VoiceThread (http://voicethread.com) to create electronic forums for my students to interact with peers around classroom content—with extraordinary results
Why twitter? Aren't there other forums to find this same information?
Clay Burell
our students have no trouble connecting, but no one has taught them about the power of these connections. Although tweens and teens may be comfortable using digital tools to build networks, few are using those networks to pursue meaningful personal growth. Our challenge as teachers is to identify ways that students can use these tools for learning.
This points to the fact that we must teach students about digital citizenship. They are creating their own rules in these online environments. They need some direction to cut down on the terrible negative sides of online life.
What if we build time into the daily classroom routine for checking and interacting with our digigal relationships. Teachers would visit their professional learning communities and students would do the same. This could be a once a week activity, or every day...
The key to becoming an effective 21st century instructor is to become an efficient 21st century learner.
Wouldn't young adults truly prepared for the 21st century have experience using computers to learn with—rather than simply about—the world?
This is exactly what I've been saying in my blog posts...
Once you've taken your digital plunge, share with students how the digital connections you engage in enhance your skills and deepen your knowledge. Model learning transparently.
I wish I had the time to keep up with all the sites out there! I remember when we first showed VoiceThread - kids loved it. Now, they are more familiar and not as excited because they use it elsewhere, which is wonderful, but requires me to keep up on the "newer" options.
Am I ready to be tethered to my phone even more than I am?
Then start by following some of the good education blogs written by teachers. Many of these are listed in the Support Blogging wiki (http://supportblogging.com) and on my list of resources (www.pageflakes.com/wferriter/16618841).
And we need to include kids in the process of creativity - what structure do they naturally follow? Have them use Bloom's taxonomy to mull over the process of creativity. What is the difference between a wild idea that is outside of the box and a wild idea that is totally out of the realm of possibility? Once the kids establish a process and structure for creative thinking, they can also begin to fill their tool kit with creative thinking tools, like SCAMPER and reverse brainstorming.
I'm not sure about this...there has to be a balance I have said for years that we need more time in school
America is now facing the biggest challenge it's ever faced—to maintain it's position in the world economies. All these things demand high levels of innovation, creativity, and ingenuity. At the moment, instead of promoting creativity, I think we're systematically educating it out of our kids.
See Ken Robinson's talk on how schools kill creativity for more on this; I think this is an opportunity to look at all of the amazing things we do in our schools already to encourage creativity and innovation and then to figure out how to expand those things rather than to feel singled out as a cause of creativity's demise.
And when you find things you're good at, you tend to get better at everything because your confidence is up and your attitude is different.
The number of kids who check out or actually drop out of school is alarming - a noticable portion of whom are gifted learners. This really concerns me.
This is one of the great skills we have to promote and teach—collaborating and benefiting from diversity rather than promoting homogeneity. We have a big problem at the moment—education is becoming so dominated by this culture of standardized testing, by a particular view of intelligence and a narrow curriculum and education system, that we're flattening and stifling some of the basic skills and processes that creative achievement depends on.
So there's no doubt in my mind that collaboration, diversity, the exchange of ideas, and building on other people's achievements are at the heart of the creative process. An education that focuses only on the individual in isolation is bound to frustrate some of those possibilities.
The regime of standardized testing has led us all to believe that if you can't count it, it doesn't count. Actually, in every creative approach some of the things we're looking for are hard, if not impossible, to quantify. But that doesn't mean they don't matter. When I hear people say, "Well, of course, you can't assess creativity," I think, "You can—just stop and think about it a bit."
This is where the value of standards based education becomes clear. I want to use meaty criteria based on student actions and products to assess learning and growth, not numbers and letters. Both my students and I can most effectively assess creativity and innovation by using criteria embedded in content standards. For example, a student can look at their brainstorming notes, organized ideas, idea development work and product creation materials to determine whether they have taken their knowledge all the way up to the top of Bloom's Taxonomy. Have they generated multiple ideas to respond to the guiding question or problem? Have they made connections between ideas to generate new thoughts? Have they piggybacked off others' ideas to create new ones? Have they organized their ideas, explored the logistics behind them and selected the best one for the situation? Have them woven their best idea into new content mastery to apply their knowledge in an innovative way? To me a student reflection around these types of questions is a much more authentic and valuable means of assessment that any attempt to put a numerical value on creativity.
These Primary Source Sets are compiled and written for educators. However, we think these collections will be of interest to many groups of users.
Check out these additions to the growing list of primary source sets, selected primary sources from the rich collections of the Library of Congress on a particular curricular topic. Designed for quick and easy download, each set includes a teacher's guide to historical context, teaching tips and analysis guides, and a graphic organizer to deepen student engagement with these rich artifacts from the past. Here are the newest topics:
+ The Industrial Revolution in the United States
Maps, songs, photos, and political cartoons tell the story of the United States' transition to an industrial nation.
+ The New Deal
Photographs, posters, oral histories, and music recount how Federal programs sought to end the Great Depression.
From the University of Colorado at Bolder comes some fantastic java-based interactive simulations. From Glaciers, to Natural Selection, to Circuit Construction; these simulations really show students how things work.
I sort of model this when I give exemplars for projects in which writing in their own words is part of a rubric. I'm not sure that is enough, however. I think maybe my writing doesn't sound enough like their writing in all cases
This instruction should focus on the supposedly simple technique of summarizing sources, which is in truth not simple. Many students are far from competent at summarizing an argument— and students who cannot summarize are the students most likely to plagiarize.
This strikes me as someting teachers in many learning areas could work on with kids rather than defaulting to Language Arts as the place where kids learn about plagiarism
The teacher in this tale uses the incident to teach students that using others' words without attribution is a serious crime. He then emphasizes to students the importance of citation and source integration techniques and enlists the school librarian to model how to cite outside works used in a piece of writing.
I'm not sure that I see the evil/missteps in this example. It doesn't say the student was punished it says the teacher & librarian used it as an opportunity to teach about proper attribution...
Educators should also communicate why writing is important. Through writing, people learn, communicate with one another, and discover and establish their own authority and identity.
Being able to write about things that you are passionate about will bring even more importance to students' writing.
it is easy for well-intentioned students to overlook the boundaries between what they themselves have produced and what they have slid from one screen (their Internet browser) to another (their word-processed document)
She begins by explaining that inserting synonyms is not paraphrasing. She then guides students in studying a passage and identifying its key words and main ideas that must be retained to paraphrase the passage. Shirley shows her students poor paraphrases of the passage for them to critique. Finally, she has them write their own paraphrase of a 50- to 100-word source passage that they themselves choose.