Assessment - important or not

In my LTT course we have been discuss assessment in education and evaluating other peoples blogs/website and their opinions on assessment. I have to say I do not agree with Gary Stager in his statement that assessment is an interruption to learning. Assessment is there to inform both the teacher and the students about learning. Chris's statement of assessment as mentoring is powerful.

Assessment can be a powerful instructive tool for students. It becomes even more powerful with the students are involved in it in some way. Last year I had my class assess each others writing, I had them read another classmates essay, and assess whether the classmate had included the criteria I had set out at the beginning. I watched my students have 'ah ha' moments, and even before they were given their own essays back realize what they had missed. It was empowering for them and me.

Personal Learning Networks

Over the past two days we have been exploring Twitter and various websites that might support our own learning. I am starting to feel a bit overwhelmed again about how much is out there. Just trying to find out 'who to follow' on Twitter is a job and a half. And then once you choose someone to follow they post websites that might be useful and then you find yourself checking those out, which inevitably leads me to another site and someone else to follow and more educational opinions to read about. As I said a bit overwhelming.

I find that trying to create my own personal learning network is harder or maybe easier than I expected. Finding relevant education sites and people to follow is easy - there are so many, but finding the time and patience to read through everything is hard, and then taking the time to process it and incorporate it into my own evolving educational beliefs. More and more I am seeing the value of creating a personal learning network, and hopefully I will soon feel brave enough to join the discussions. I have joined Classroom 2.0, and signed up to be apart of 'The Tomatosphere" Project, and think I will join the educators PLN. Collaboration is important, I encourage my students to work together. I need to do the same.

Knowledge . . . Education . . .Technology

Why content? Technology uses across the content areas? Across the grades? Our education system?



While I was reading Gilbert's article, Knowledge, the disciplines, and learning in the Digital Age, I kept thinking that if we could do it all over again . . . if we could recreate the educational system today what would the education system look like? Our educational system needs a change, it feels like we are so content driven that we lose sight of purpose of education. Content is important, but also the process of getting there, the skills, problem solving, social interaction, etc. Technology across the grades and content areas can be used to explore, manipulate, present, analyze the content in dynamic ways. Technology enhances the educational process and opens up the world. Gilbert says that knowledge is constructed collaboratively, what better way to do this than the the medium of technology.

The Program Capacities - My Goal

Capacity number 5: Access, evaluate, use and participate in new media interactions in education.

This is the hardest one for me to wrap my mind around and to stretch myself to do. It is going beyond my comfort zone to comment on someones blog or join in an eluminate session. I think that I have nothing worth while to contribute or say. Though I believe that the global perspective is important and I find it worth while to read other peoples articles, and comments and I will need to join in. If knowledge is built together through conversation, than I need to get involved.

A Goal for September 2010

From the ISTE standards one goal I have chosen to focus on this next semester is to advocate, model, and teach safe, legal and ethical use of digital information and technology, including respect for copyright, intellectual property, and the appropriate documentation of sources. For my teaching practice I believe this is an important part of the curriculum and an important skill for the students to learn. With the Internet everything is available at our finger tips, ‘just Google it’ is a common phrase in the classroom. Last year, with my grade 6 class, I tried to do a research project just using the books in the library. I had to relent when I realized that the library did not have the resources available. So the students need to learn to use the Internet appropriately - not just copy and paste and then change one or two words. Even though I teach this and proper note taking, with the use of the computer it is just to tempting to students to take short cuts - so I feel I need to be more proactive.

Crap Detection - Response

Teaching our children to think critically about what they find on the internet, how to ask the right question when doing a search, to help and teach the students to build 'personal trust' networks. What implications does this have in my practice? A lot. . . it is taking it one step further, moving from textbooks, which are ministry approved resources to trying to teach the students to filter all the information they can find on the internet. As Howard Rheingol' vlog post indicates it is important to teach the children to detect all the crap out there. All ready in the intermediate classrooms we are having to do this every time we assign a research project.

I attempted to limit my students on an essay to strictly finding their information from non-fiction books, unfortunately my school library did not have everything we were looking for and I had to relent and let the students use the internet. I was trying to teach them to take notes without the temptation of copy and paste that is so readily accessible on the computer. So much for that idea - then I tried to limit them to World Book Student website, but it also didn't have enough information. In the end we used a variety of websites and I had to continually remind them that wikianswers is not a creditable source. So all that to say it is extremely important to teach the students how to search and how to sift through what they find and we only have 5 hours in a day in which to get all this done!

Networks and learning . . .

If I think about my classroom and when learning takes place with my students, some of the most significant learning is through discussion, when we are pulling apart ideas and together constructing knowledge. The students in the classroom act as a networked environment and knowledge and meaning change as we discuss, read, and explore different topics. The internet has opened up a whole new networked environment that we can tap into. We have at our finger tips a vast resource of information and opinions in which to explore our environment and construct knowledge from this. My struggle is how to incorporate this into my teaching in an effective way and how to teach my students to not take everything they read on the internet at face value as 'fact' but to look at the information critically, to question it.