Bank Street College has a series of what they call “occasional papers” posted on their site. There’s one called “Toward Meaningful Assessments” which explores this from the perspective of a group of 1st grade teachers in NYC using performance assessments. There are several more occasional papers available on the site — on equally interesting topics.
Khan Academy
I’m doing some research on Khan Academy and this post is where I’m collecting my thoughts and resources.
Sylvia Martinez, president of Generation YES, is someone whose opinion I have great respect for. She has four blog posts about Khan Academy and math.
Frank Noschese’s blog has a ton of information. Frank is a National Board Certified Physics teacher. After reading his “Khan final remarks” post, you will want to read through all of his posts via the Khan Academy Criticism blog menu link. I especially appreciate the way Noschese has links to so many sources.
Jonathan Martin’s blog post about Khan Academy has the 60 Minutes video clip embedded at the top of the post. Take note of the comments after the post, as well.
The best news of all is that there is another free resource besides Khan Academy. You may have heard of Mathematica software or the Wolfram Alpha search site. They now have free learning resources on the Wolfram Education Portal. The site is in beta right now, so there’s more to come!
Learning to Use Sakai
A few years ago, ConVal joined a consortium of K-12 school districts in New Hampshire that were starting to use the Sakai content management system, a full featured system used by many universities and a limited number of K-12 schools. Initially, ConVal began using Sakai for its ePortfolio component, but that has now expanded to exploring the potential of using Sakai to support blended (online and in-school) learning.
Here are a few resources on how others use Sakai:
- UNC Chapel Hill uses Sakai and has a great blog with a variety of info, including short, insightful video clips from faculty who have learned what works best for them and their students. In an interview with Dr. Scott Bowman at UNC, we learn how his students benefitted from a highly engaging semester long wiki project.
- Kelly Pickering at TAFE-North Sydney Institute, Australia won a Sakai best practices award. Here’s a great list of how she uses several Sakai tools:
- Announcements – to initiate participation in online activities and to communicate valuable eLearning and course related news,
- Blogger – used as a Reflective Journal Blog involving self-reflection and critical analysis,
- Wiki – for sharing extra information and providing learners a chance to contribute to the learning content,
- Lessons – providing access to a range of engaging multimedia,
- Discussion Board and Forum – to promote group collaboration, the sharing of ideas and as an assessment method,
- Chat room and Mail – to connect the group,
- Tests and Tasks – for online quizzes reinforcing knowledge, preparing learners for assessments and obtaining feedback through survey options,
- Assignments – for easy online assessment submissions and
- Podcasts – providing another learning resource enabling more things to be done on the move through the podcatcher feature.
THE Journal published an article last year comparing the leading open source solutions for learning management systems. One of the school systems mentioned in the article is the Bexley School District in Ohio, which uses Sakai. Here is the landing page to get to Bexley’s Sakai course sites. I like the way they display three icons: one to get to their course sites, a second to get to assignments, and a third to go straight to the staff directory. Bexley also has a nice set of slides to describe their journey to full implementation.
Another school district mentioned as using Sakai is the Minisink Valley Central School District in central New York State.
Sakai is used by several New Hampshire school districts. The Sakai Collaborative home page has a list with links to their respective sites.
Since many schools are now using Google Apps in Education, the app created by rSmart is a valuable tool. Here is a short YouTube video showing the power of this integration between the two.
There are more YouTube videos available on Sakai topics.
School Technology Audits
I have started researching the various types of technology audits that have been done by schools in our state and elsewhere. Today I came across this nicely articulated journal article – K-12 technology audit: Lessons for school leaders | IEJLL University of Calgary
I have also been taking a closer look at SchoolDude’s IT modules (our district already has their inventory module, ITAM Direct) and comparing it to the open source SpiceWorks software (which has a as an alternative inventory solution). It appears to me that we might be able to accomplish a great deal of data collection and analysis about our infrastructure if we were to more fully and consistently implement one of these.
My goal this week is to articulate how this might all fit together with (a) the new requirement to submit data for the “Technology Readiness Tool” and (b) our district’s need to conduct a full audit of our current network, equipment, bandwidth, and staffing levels. This will allow us to much more clearly say what we need in terms of technology acquisitions and implementation if we want to succeed in our vision of creating high quality 21st century learning environments. Here is a recent note on the Assess4Ed.net website about the question of bandwidth capacity for online testing:
The June 2011 report ( http://www.setda.org/c/documen
t_library/get_file?folderId= [1]) recommends that devices be wired, but does not require it. Again, it is overall bandwidth going into the building and the amount of bandwidth available to each device within the building that should be the concern, not the type of connectivity. A school with with a 1GBPS WAN connection and a robust 802.11n wireless network working on 1GBPS internal LAN with excellent coverage would be better served with 100 wireless devices simultaneously taking an assessment than would be a school with a T1 WAN and 25 wired devices operating with old 10/100 ethernet switches. Arbitrarily specifying wired or wireless would be a disservice to those schools that have made significant upgrades to their wireless network infrastracture. I know that in my own building there are low quality wired drops that operate at only 10 MBPS where a roomful of laptops can connect at 100 plus MBPS to a single wireless AP to access a bandwidth intensive math simulation (Carnegie Cognitive Tutor).344&name=DLFE-1336.pdf
This Tech Readiness Tool is just one aspect of a larger need we (and all schools) have to have a clear and comprehensive picture of what it will take to get where we need to be. Along these lines, the Digital Textbook Playbook, mentioned in this article, and hosted on this FCC page is another resource that is likely to be incredibly helpful.
Lastly, we will need some really good visuals for this work. Thanks to my Twitter feeds, I picked up a nice blog post on 7 different data visualization tools. One that I think might be helpful for our tech audit process is ManyEyes, a free tool created by a team at IBM Research. Of course, there’s always the standard data graphing tools built into Excel and Google Spreadsheets.