You can read notes from the talk on my blog and hear my audio reflections in this podcast.

ENG 315 Podcast 7 – Reflections on Talk by Dr. Steve Graham

What is common across all kinds of assessments? For what purposes might tests be better suited as an assessment tool? When would you choose to use these different kinds of assessments and why?

Command Performance: Creating Accountability That Works | Edutopia

While schools wait for innovation in accountability testing, some are taking matters into their own hands, creating performance assessments that guide and strengthen teaching and learning. Typically, these assessments come in the form of portfolios and presentations — tasks that bear something in common with the kind of work students may ultimately do in college or in a job.

If you haven’t yet read any of Kozol’s work, I think that it would be worth your time to grab one of his books for your summer reading list.

Teaching with Passion: Advice for Young Educators | Edutopia

For more than forty years, Jonathan Kozol has taught in, worked with, and written about America’s inner city public schools. His straight talk in best-selling books such as Savage Inequalities and Amazing Grace has made him a hero of many teachers, and he fiercely opposes government policies he believes perpetuate educational inequities.

In his newest book, Letters to a Young Teacher, Kozol takes aim at the test-driven curriculum proliferating our educational system. Through a series of personal letters to Francesca, a fledgling first-grade teacher in Boston who invited him into her classroom, Kozol delivers sage advice, sharp criticism of the status quo, and stories of his own early teaching experiences. As Publishers Weekly remarked, it is “an impassioned book, not only for what it imparts of classroom doings, but even more so for the obstacles increasingly being laid at teachers’ hands.”

• In what ways is understanding and using technology a literacy skill? How does it relate to reading and writing?
• To what extent do I, as a language arts teacher, have the responsibility to teach my students these skills in an already jam-packed curriculum and school year?
• What are the specific skills that tests like these are attempting to assess and how do these skills relate to what you are teaching in a writing workshop including elements of choice, time, inquiry, revision, and publication?

Education Week: Tests of Tech Literacy Still Not Widespread Despite NCLB Goals

Any educator who’s ever had to ask a pupil to fix a computer might be surprised to learn that not all students are technologically proficient—or at least not savvy enough to be considered “technologically literate.”

While that term has no universal definition, the core idea could be boiled down to this: Technologically literate students not only know how to operate hardware and software—they can also analyze the information flowing through it, evaluate that digital content’s relative merit and relevance, and use it creatively and ethically in communicating with others.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law six years ago, made it a national goal for all 8th graders to be technologically literate. Unlike reading and math, though, tech literacy does not factor into the law’s school accountability provisions, and most states do not administer separate tech-literacy tests statewide.

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I encourage you to check out this live webcast Wed. night. I have worked with many of these teachers through the National Writing Project and this looks to be an outstanding use of blogging as a way to inspire student writing:

Help us plan our Spring Blogging curriculum on Teachers Teaching Teachers this week.

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Tomorrow we’re going to find out if eight people can plan a curriculum together. These 8 teachers from Writing Projects across the country are planning to meet and talk about a 15-week blogging curriculum that they have started to put together (see below.)

Join these teachers at http://EdTechTalk.com/live at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times .

Bob Levin and Gail Desler (Area 3 Writing Project, Sacramento, CA)
Woody Woodgate (Alaska Writing Project, Marshall, Alaska)
Bill O’Neal (Trenton, NJ Writing Project)
Chris Sloan (Wasatch Range Writing Project, Salt Lake City, Utah)
Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim (New York City Writing Project)
Lee Baber (Shenandoah Mountains, Virginia)

Our curriculum so far… ( add your thoughts at http://elggplans.wikispaces.com/Curriculum )

To: Students
From: Your teacher
RE: Our blogging curriculum

Essential Questions
* What are you passionate about and how do these interests fit with our big questions?
* What voices or sources of information do you think are important to include in your search for answers?
* How do you become an effective networker and get people with shared interests to value your voice online?
* How can you use our social networks as personal learning sites that lead to social action?

Enduring Knowledge
This curriculum is about what you do when you sit down to work at your computer. It is about creating a space in your life for you to safely extend and explore your online voice with a group of peers, both at your school and around the world. You will learn about re-blogging and how people choose to build together and share their creations and their resources. By following this curriculum, you will identify ideas and issues that are of importance to you, learn more about them and find other people who share your interests and passions. Being able to have a substantial online presence and network effectively are necessary skills today for success. Fluency in text, images and audio are part of this communication. Through the work in this curriculum you will develop your sense of humor, cleverness and understanding of how people use their online communication skills to affect the world in many different ways including political, civic, academic and entertainment spheres.

Online Toolbox
Like a carpenter would assemble and sharpen his or her tools before beginning to build, you will be adding to your toolbox for online communication. Specifically we will introduce or review the following tools and ask you to use them.

First Tools
* Gmail or another email that you use for school purposes. This will be your professional, work or school email. (Suggestion – but I think it should be gmail to get a google account and you need another email anyway when you register with gmail)
* Google Docs (expressive writing, editing, sharing) or any word processor such as Word ( no not for me – not OR – I want them to use docs – they already use word) (Not sure who made this comment, but I agree that we should encourage Docs when writing collaboratively. For “solo” pieces, I think Word is fine. – gail)
* Tumblr or Blogger (collecting, publishing, inviting conversation, building a portfolio)
* iGoogle or Tabbed Browsing on Firefox or Flock (a way to have all tools easily available on the desktop)

Multimedia Tools
* Splashup, Photoshop or another image editor (to create graphics–like an icon or name banner)
* Audacity, Adobe Audition or Garage Band/iTunes (recording, editing sound)
* VoiceThread (multimedia presentation, inviting conversation)
* Tagzania (mapping, tagging, collaborating)
* Flash and other open source free animation programs (to push the way we think about order and telling)

Social and Collaborative Tools
* Youth Voices or Personal Learning Space (blogging in a social network)
* Youthwiki (collecting, presenting in a collaborative wiki space)
* Google Reader (reading, organizing information, (suggestion – reading text feeds –such as NYTimes or Sports programs) and listening to podcasts–such as NPR or WNYC programs)
* Twitter (questions, capturing process thinking, back channelling) or your teacher’s public wiki (suggestion- sharing and building information resources)

Elgg Plans » Curriculum

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