As I catch up on readings and resources from other blogs, listservs, and journals, I found several things I’d like to share. I’m calling them WOWs because that’s what I say when I see them – in some cases a positive wow (with one or more exclamation points) and in a few cases a disappointed wow (followed by an arrggh).
I’ll get the disappointing one out of the way fast. Read about how one high school is responding to the mandate for science testing. Is this what NCLB at the high school level is all about? In case you think that this is a unique situation, I know of an elementary school where it has been decided that science and social studies are not taught until after the state tests are over. This means no science or social studies until April! I shudder to think what happens to the arts and physical education, too. What are we teachers going to do about this?
One thing we can do is become more savvy about assessments and their purposes. The December/January issue of Educational Leadership deals with the theme of “Informative Assessment.” Most of the articles are available to all, with a few reserved for ASCD members. But there are enough public ones, including one from Carol Ann Tomlinson on “Learning to Love Assessment” with ten basic understandings about the real purposes of assessment as an integral part of learning, not a mandated add-on.
But on to the other positive wows! The February edition of Learning and Leading with Technology (from the International Society for Technology in Education) has a neat article on how two high school science teachers are using iPods in their classes to share graphics, podcasts (many of which the students create), and class materials. The article is available online to members of ISTE, but perhaps your tech director of another colleague is a member. Or if you email me or reply to this post, I’ll send you the email of one of the authors. (I was pleased to see that their school is just down the road from me).
The January edition of Learning and Leading describes a tool for helping students to plan and prepare reports (essays, slides as in PowerPoints, or video/multimedia). Although there is a brief article about this tool (available electronically to ISTE members), you can go right to the Research Project Calculator website and poke around. I would use this tool to model the process for my students, since I found that even in high school (and in the grad classes I taught), students need guidance in organization and time management. A great feature of this tool is the way that the students can email the resources and scheduler to themselves and also receive email reminders about the milestone dates. These emails link directly back to the website and its resources. There is even a self-evaluation section for the students to reflect on the process and the quality of their work. The teacher resources include rubrics and print handouts to assist students and to inform the library media staff about the projects. An interesting action research project would be to have some classes use this tool while others use a traditional approach.