Category: assessment
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Railroads and virtual connections
I love railroads. Had I lived in a bygone era, I feel certain I would have been drawn to work around or on railroads when they were the primary “connecting technology” which brought people together and made geographic places seem far closer. I’ve reflected several times in the past on the similarities between physical railroads…
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Magically entered data
If you have not recently created a spreadsheet in Google Documents and used the free option to create a form, you should give it a try. I still subscribe to Surveymonkey and use it for some web surveys, but increasingly I find myself using Google Documents for web forms. Why? It is free so when…
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$100 million for a petaflop of performance
Remember the ENIAC computer? (Well, I guess I’m not actually asking if you REMEMBER it– as in you SAW it in person– more if you read and learned about it in the past.) According to the current WikiPedia entry, it was unveiled in 1946 and cost approximately $500,000. ENIAC was designed and built to calculate…
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Reflections on IQ, cognitive development, and distributed learning
If you and your students think you face “high stakes” for standardized tests taken at school this year, consider the case of Daryl Atkins, whose life was literally on the line based on his repeated test performances. His story is instructive not only because of the heavy weight it shows our society sometimes places on…
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Looking beyond coercion, tests and seat time
One of the paradoxical results of our politically-imposed focus on high stakes accountability and test scores in U.S. K-12 public schools is that many teachers and students have their eyes on minimum standards rather than exceptionally high expectations for each student’s learning and growth. Arnold Toynbee’s quotation of the day from my iGoogle portal resonates…
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Presentations from Richardson, Texas this morning
Both my keynote address and the session I co-presented with Vicki Allen were broadcast live over the web this morning from Richardson, Texas, and are available as archived videos. If you watched either or both of these videos “live” or view the archived versions, please leave comments and feedback here! Unfortunately the chat feature of…
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Podcast247: Transformative Project Based Learning in a 1:1 Laptop Initiative: 10 Years of Lessons and Best Practices at Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii
This podcast is a recording of a conversation on December 5, 2007 with Judy Beaver, director of instructional technology at the Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii, about their 1:1 laptop learning initiative. Judy discusses how she utilized research findings from Dr. Robert Marzano’s noted book “Classroom Instruction that Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement”…
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Raising expectations for learning and assessment
In his article “Teaching To A Test Worth Teaching To In College And High School” Dr. Richard H. Hersh makes the case that in our era of high-stakes testing, in many schools expectations for student learning have been LOWERED to a lowest common denominator. Rather than expecting students to master not only content area knowledge…
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Podcast239: 21st Century Learning: Embedding New Skills and Assessments by Dr. Richard Hersh (COSN 2008 Keynote)
This podcast features a recording of Dr. Richard Hersh’s comments on March 10, 2008, at the COSN Conference in Washington D.C. in the opening keynote panel discussion. Dr. Hersh currently serves as the Co-Director of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) the College and Work Readiness Assessment (CWRA.) He is focused on encouraging educators (as well…