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Monthly Archives: October 2009

DiigoNotes – How schools get it wrong

31 Saturday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in MyNotes

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  • How schools get it wrong – thestar.com

    • How schools get it wrong

    • We’ve made quantum leaps in understanding children’s developing brains. So why are classrooms still organized like last century’s assembly lines?

    • do we agree on what schools are for? Or, for that matter, the goal of education?

    • I’ve spent chunks of the past year in classrooms all over the world, pondering this question.

      One of the worst experiences was in a respectable public middle school in North America where I was giving a talk in the auditorium. Teachers patrolled the sides of the room like prison guards, silently threatening the children by looming over them when they showed the least bit of enthusiasm.

      I was telling the kids stories and asking them questions, and they were getting all excited figuring out answers despite the menacing presences. Finally, one of their teachers sidled up to me and said: "Don’t ask them questions. Just tell them what you want them to know."

      I formed the image that she wanted me to just zip open their heads and pour in the information, unfiltered by their own ideas. It felt like she thought their brains were just storage silos.

    • Is it for the transmission of culture and potted knowledge, akin to filling a CD-ROM? Is it to foster skills that will serve society down the road, or make dutiful employees? Or perhaps it’s a strategy to make sure a nation’s gross domestic product keeps rising?

    • Is it a sorting mechanism aimed at working out where in the class system a student ought to land? Or to encourage upward mobility? Should it build character? Endow morals?

      Is it a way for the new generation to question the values of the old? Or is it for making sure they don’t?

    • In What’s the Point of School? Rediscovering the Heart of Education, he notes that one of these hidden, ancient images is of a boy preparing for the priesthood. That model, developed 4,000 years ago, holds that knowledge is the "eternal Truth," never to be questioned.

      "The image of school as monastery persists up to the present and the classrooms of Mesopotamia, 2500 B.C., would be instantly recognizable to the students of today," he writes.

    • "(This supposes that knowledge) can be standardized, installed in manuals called `textbooks,’ and chopped up into different sized bits – syllabuses, topics, schemes of work, and eventually the content of individual lessons – that can be bolted on, as it were, to students’ minds bit by bit," Claxton writes.

    • Today, many parents and teachers believe that the best defence against an uncertain future is to teach children to learn how to learn. To them, that is the goal of education.

      They believe the education system should unearth and ignite their children’s passion, their intrinsic desire to learn, the deep joy of discovery.

    • neuroscientific findings are telling us that the brain learns – or forms strong neural connections – when the child is in a calm, emotionally regulated state.

    • "The first question is: Have we created an educational workforce that has the tools to perform this holistic function? And of course the answer is: No, we haven’t."

    • The teacher becomes a guide and model, a co-conspirator on the engrossing quest for understanding and self-knowledge.

      And what should they guide and model? The higher-order habits of mind that characterize the expert investigator, researcher, thinker and learner, says Claxton.

    • the school system faces daily demands to host our children; it can’t shut down to retool. Another is that education is big business, set in its ways. It is a livelihood for education bureaucrats, teachers, teachers’ teachers, textbook publishers and school-builders.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Caught in the Current – Pondering Teacher Leadership

31 Saturday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, Leadership, NJEA09, NJEATLP, Research, Transformation, Transparency

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Source: http://www.uscgsanfrancisco.com/clients/c833/34975.jpg

Kevin Jarrett asks these questions via multiple tweets, hoping we’ll provide some perspective. As a veteran educator caught up in the ebb-n-flow of reforms that do little but erode the education establishment, much less transform it, I despair that I have any answers to offer. Yet consideration of the questions is important, if only because Kevin dared to ask them.

His questions include the following:

  • “What evidence do you see re: teacher leadership & its impact on school, community, student learning or job satisfaction?”
  • “What should a teacher leader know and be able to do?
  • “How do we build capacity for teacher leadership?”
  • “What makes you a teacher leader?”

Rather than try to steer my own way clear of the current that draws me into the inescapable deep, I’m going to try to respond from my perspective as someone caught in the current. A middle-aged educator with a mortgage, family to feed and form, desperate to find the funding needed to keep my legacy as being more than electrons scattered throughout the edublogosphere, a few words on journals and magazines tossed into corners, immortalized and inconsequential…and, I’m going to have fun. And, that may mean my answers are no more useful to Kevin than a breeze on a cool day.

What makes you a teacher leader?
In my lofty position as administrator, I am entrenched in the culture and vision of the education establishment. Wherever I look, I see darkness and despair at the options available to our Texas children. They are slaving away in a system that not only disenfranchises them from the present reality of interconnected creativity, but also, the future possible to them. If I would identify any qualities for a teacher leader, it would be those intangibles that have little to do with your methodology, your merit, or how quickly you fill out paperwork…what makes a teacher leader is an indefatigable hope, unflappable in the face of endless meetings about mundane events that mean nothing, articulating the truth in ways that are palatable to the principals and paper-pushers whose motto is, “Soldier, ask not…” their thoughts and minds locked to a single purpose–do what they are told.

In the face of the greyness, the sameness of uniformity, the systematic supercilious complexity of captive minds imagining terror, I seek courage in the teacher leader to be different in simple ways.

How do we build capacity for teacher leadership?
We build capacity for teacher leadership, not by building those programs in schools, but in our churches and homes. We encourage thinking and the leadership that is the independent, American mind, unafraid to accept what must be done and then to do it with respect for, but not fear of, the consequences. If a teacher is fortunate enough to find someone, then let it be that one teacher will help another in the trenches, not to help them do what they are told, but to help them find the way to open the door for students who must find their own way.

What should a teacher leader know and be able to do?
A teacher leader should know how to help fellow teachers, be skillful in the use of a wide variety of tools and approaches that passionately engage learners, as well as nurture them in their growth and forward movement. They should know when to subvert the mission given to them, to make it sparkle rather than dull in the face of strict instruction, smile and collaboratively help others to learn within the context of a powerful professional learning network that expands professional learning beyond classroom walls…their approach is passionately reflective, and peaceful without rancor or bitterness.

What evidence do you see re: teacher leadership & its impact on school, community, student learning or job satisfaction?
The only evidence I see is the teacher as a stalwart of the community, relied upon by others. I’ve seen it more in small rural districts than in urban districts that swallow people alive…there’s something to the small pond and the impact one can have. For a teacher to be a leader, their effect has to be made in the community in which they work, their relationships have to encompass more than their teaching….

If 150 relationships is all we can handle, perhaps we need to form smaller communities that are close enough to each other to benefit from shared wisdom but far enough to recognize the value of a teacher who dares to hope, is brave enough to act, wise enough to speak when others would be silent, and to say that which must be said without offense.

There, Kevin, I’ve given you totally useless answers to your questions. Now, what did you expect me to say?

In the meantime, consider the following:

  • Most researchers agree that teacher leaders demonstrate expertise in their instruction and share that knowledge with colleagues; are consistently on a professional learning curve; practice reflection; engage in continuous action research; collaborate with peers, parents, and communities; become socially aware and politically involved; mentor new teachers; become more involved in preparing pre-service teachers; and are risk-takers who participate in school decisions. (Source)
  • Being a teacher leader means sharing and representing relevant and key ideas of our work as teachers in contexts beyond our individual classrooms so as to improve the education of our students and our ability to provide it for them. (Source)
  • Teacher leadership is the process by which teachers, individualy or collectively, influence their colleagues, principals, and other members of the school communities to improve teaching and learning practices with the aim of increased student learning and achievement. (Source)
  • Results indicated that ongoing, high quality professional development experiences played an important role in their [teacher leader] careers. Their ability to collaborate with peers and to become more reflective practitioners was enhanced by powerful professional development. These experiences also expanded their professional networks. . .Besides high levels of expertise, collaboration, reflection, empowerment, and flexibility, teachers needed to develop sophisticated expertise in pedagogical content knowledge and a professional network to support ongoing learning in order to be effective leaders. The encouragement of respected mentors and colleagues, coupled with continuous nourishment of their intellectual interests through rigorous learning opportunities, were the keys to their success. (Source)


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Navel Gazing

31 Saturday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in MGBlog

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Ok, allow me a moment to enjoy the navel gazing without staring too intently….

If only it was due to my excellent writing, not this pumpkin image that has captured the eye of quite a few people!

Read the blog entry it goes with…from Halloween, 2008!


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Make a Social Media Mosaic

30 Friday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, SocialMedia, TechForumSW9

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Source: Sunflowers by Rebecca Broyles;
http://www.mosaicworks.com/images/studentmosaics/sunfloweradv.jpg

At TechForum Southwest 2009 on November 6, 2009, I get to facilitate a roundtable discussion about “Getting the Word Out to the Community with Social Networking Tools.” Not having facilitated a roundtable discussion before–face to face, isn’t that ironic?–I’m wondering about the structure of a roundtable.

Some of the roundtable discussions I’ve participated in start off with, “Ok, we’re going to be discussing [enter subject]. Let’s go around the table and get perspectives.” This sounds like a perfectly good way to get started, but then I find the challenge of wanting to participate in the discussion rather than just get caught up in listening to great perspectives others offer. My perspective is we need to aim for the heart of those we interact with, be useful, and encourage everyone to contribute to a mosaic of the organization.

With using Social Networking Tools, I want to share Seth Godin’s perspective within an educational organizational context. That is, if a school district is using social media tools, they have to do more than “Top down messaging encourages an echo chamber (agree with this edict or change the channel)” (read the rest of Seth’s blog entry).

In fact, if you had to characterize how school districts and organizations use tools like Twitter and Facebook, it might come look like this with Seth’s points as the main thrust of each example:

1) “Defense of the status quo encouraged by an audience self-selected to be uniform.” Imagine a school district that ignores everything news organizations and others may have tweeted about it (since the content was “negative”) and instead chose to only tweet the comments that were positive. There is certainly some control going on there.

2) “Top down messaging encourages an echo chamber (agree with this edict or change the channel).” Imagine a school district that sends out tweets that are links to press releases on its web site, feature a video that is only positive. The goal is to manage perception of others “out there” rather than be transparent and truthfully deal with the issues that are of real concern. The problem with the former approach rather than the transparent one is that people are going to talk about your organization, whether you like what they say or not.

3) “Unwillingness to review past mistakes in light of history and use those to do better next time.” Every organization makes mistakes but admitting to them must be in the “No-No” book. In fact, it probably has something to do with legal liability because organizations are afraid to admit they are wrong and then take decisive action on it. Maybe it’s because decisive action has to be taken by one individual–the Superintendent–and that’s just something she/he is too busy to deal with.

Solution to these challenges? If you want to get the word out, don’t try to substitute your message about what’s going on with THEIR perception of what’s happening. Acknowledge their perception, negative or otherwise, focus on action taken, and share the effects of those actions…and empower everyone, unleashing every facet of your academic community (parents, students, teachers in classrooms) to speak up and do that.

Rather than a broken, fractured perspective, you may end up with a mosaic of what your organization is like…much more valuable, very engaging to the “creators!”


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

DiigoNotes – Blackboard’s Response to Open Source: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

30 Friday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in MoodleConversations, MyNotes, OnlineLearning, Research

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“Our business is built around the status quo,” points out Seth Godin in this blog post, “and it’s not fair that the market wants something else now.” These words describe so many companies who suffering the effects of disruptive technologies, scrambling to stay alive in the face of “easy to use, not quite perfect or the best but good enough to get the job done for what I need.” One example of a type of business who’s crying “Not fair!” includes course management systems, like Blackboard who gobbled up WebCT and Angel to the complaint of some of its customers. In fact, thanks to Angelic Learning, check out these stories of people fleeing the “black hole,” as that blogger colorfully puts it, below:

  • (4 campuses) went to ANGEL from Blackboard starting the Fall 2007 semester. The reasons given were: 1. Cost – Blackboard was too expensive compared to ANGEL. 2. Service – weeks and months would often pass before problem tickets were addressed. 3. Faculty approved ANGEL over Blackboard and competing systems.”
  • moved from Blackboard to ANGEL in 2005 due to Blackboard’s outrageous prices and deplorable customer service.”
  • “after Blackboard bought WebCT (the college) was not treated well and support went downhill quickly.”
  • “left WebCT 4.1 because of the Blackboard purchase. Too many problems with Blackboard support.”
  • “We moved from Blackboard to ANGEL in summer 2007 for a few reasons, #1-price, #2-functionality, #3-support!”
  • And many more….

In light of this conversation, it was fascinating to read a blog posting about assertions Blackboard makes in regards to Open Source alternatives like Sakai and Moodle. The blog’s author makes some interesting points, not all of which are represented in the notes I thought worth keeping and sharing on my blog. While I encourage you to read the blog entry in its entirety, I thought I might share a few points of my own.

While proprietary companies are silently paddling like heck under the water to stay afloat in a world where their services have suddenly become “free,” you have to admire any company for their attacks on competitors (e.g. Desire2Learn) and denial of the truths that many educators–slow as we are in understanding technology’s application to the work we do–are now accepting, in spite of the “Our Proprietary solution IS an enterprise solution.” These proprietary companies are NOT quietly going to go into the night with a whimper…I have to admire that.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Read the rest of the poem by Dylan Thomas

That poem’s reference to no forked lightning is defined as “ failed to command attention; failed to express a startling or revolutionary concept.” (source)

In light of FOSS tools become available and slowly growing over time, it’s no surprise, right? Proprietary tools no longer command our attention.

But what tools DO command attention, especially in course management systems? Well, though I advocate for the use of any FOSS course management system that meets the needs of an educational organization at lower cost and makes technical support required…well…less technical. That includes solutions I’m familiar with, such as Moodle, or those I’m not, like Sakai,

While support costs can be high, they are NOTHING compared to the recurring license fees of proprietary solution vendors. In times of economic hardship, and even in times of prosperity, it is incumbent upon school district administrators to be sensitive to saving funding so they can invest it in teachers and students. The “education industrial complex,” as I think Chris Lehman (Practical Theory) characterized it as cited in Will Richardson blog entry I read this week, is undeserving of any mercy since they have bled school coffers dry.

Proprietary solution providers, beware…you reap what you sow.

  • Blackboard’s Response to Open Source: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

    • Blackboard has not been having a good time in the state of North Carolina. As I noted recently, the University of North Carolina (a Blackboard customer) reported highly favorable results of their pilot study of Sakai, with an outcome of further investigation into Sakai as a full replacement of Blackboard as their primary LMS. It turns out that this was following on the heels of a similar study done by the North Carolina Community College system favorably comparing Moodle to Blackboard. The details were different but some of the underlying dynamics were the same: the open source system in each case was found to be functionally equivalent to Blackboard for all practical purposes, the open source platforms did roughly as well as Blackboard (in the Moodle evaluation) or better than Blackboard (in the Sakai case) in usability evaluations, and Blackboard was deemed to be expensive relative to the alternatives.

    • poor support was one of the major complaints about Blackboard in the original NCCCS report. It is important to remember that, just as software development under and open source license is not inherently inadequate for the needs of large institutions, neither is software developed under a proprietary license—even by a relatively large company like Blackboard—inherently adequate.

    • It’s important to understand that open source projects are not inherently any more insecure than proprietary software development efforts.

    • If Blackboard can’t help you fix your problems, you’re out of luck, because nobody else understands their code or has the right to look at it. If your Moodle vendor can’t help you, you can go to another vendor, or find another adopting school that knows how to fix the problem. You can also fix it yourself. You don’t have to, but unlike with Blackboard, you can. Likewise, if Blackboard were to go out of business (ask WebCT or ANGEL customers if this sort of thing ever happens), you would’t be able to find somebody else to support and continue to develop your platform. Not true with open source support vendors.

    • Schools that have their systems hosted by Moodle vendors such as Moodlerooms or Remote Learner, or Sakai vendors such as Unicon or rSmart, have highly predictable costs with no additional staff required.

    • the Moodle community includes some of the largest distance learning programs in the world, such as Open University UK and Open Polytechnic in New Zealand, not to mention many U.S. community colleges.

    • With a proprietary product like Blackboard, just as with an open source community, development resources are going to go toward whatever projects that whoever controls the resources perceives to be in the interest of a critical mass of the adopting schools. Any proprietary company, including Blackboard, is obliged to prioritize functionality requests of a majority of the customers they happen to have, sometimes at the expense of the needs of a minority. The risks to adopting schools are therefore substantially the same.

    • Blackboard provides the least transparency of any vendor or open source project in this product category. Their dismissal of the notion that an open source project could keep up with new innovations also rings hollow, and not just for LIS. If I recall correctly, Moodle also supported grading discussion posts long before Blackboard did, to cite one example of innovation that started in the open source LMSs and has been copied by Blackboard.

    • NCCCS’s pilot and case studies found that Moodle’s usability is basically equal to Blackboard’s. UNC’s pilot studies found that Sakai’s usability is better than Blackboard’s.

    • According to the NCCCS report, member schools went to Moodle in the first place because the high fees and poor customer service from Blackboard were creating costly resource distractions.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

State Technology Allotment Update

30 Friday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, Texas, TexasEducationAgency

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The following note was shared recently referencing a source at the Texas Education Agency (TEA):

There has been some confusion regarding the technology allotment. The 81st Texas Legislature did fund the technology allotment. According to the To The Administrator Addressed letter dated August 10, 2009, the technology allotment is based on rate of $29.43 multiplied by your district’s 2009–10 estimated refined ADA, and accounted for in the special revenue fund 11. (See http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/taa/statefund080709.html).

In past years, the allotment has been paid as early as November and as late as January. For the 2009-2010 school year, the allotment is scheduled to be paid in May.

There has also been some confusion regarding the use of technology allotment funds. According to the Texas Education Code, the technology allotment may be used only to:

(1) provide for the purchase by school districts of electronic textbooks or technological equipment that contributes to student learning; and

(2) pay for training educational personnel directly involved in student learning in the appropriate use of electronic textbooks and for providing for access to technological equipment for instructional use.

The Agency has interpreted this to mean that the allotment may be used to employ staff to train educational personnel directly involved in student learning in the appropriate use of electronic textbooks and for providing access to technological equipment for instructional use.

Instructional Materials and Education Technology
Texas Education Agency


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

DiigoNotes – Using Writing In Mathematics

30 Friday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, MyNotes, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Fascinating approach to writing about a subject I hate to think about, much less be meta-cognitive about–Mathematics.

  • Using Writing In Mathematics

    • Using Writing In Mathematics

    • This strand provides a developmental model for incorporating writing into a math class. The strand includes specific suggestions for managing journals, developing prompts for writing, and providing students with feedback on their writing. In addition, the site includes two sample lessons for introducing students to important ideas related to writing about their mathematical thinking.

      • Writing about thinking is challenging. For this reason, it’s best not to start out having students write about unfamiliar mathematical ideas. First get them used to writing in a math class:

        • Begin with affective, open-ended questions about students’ feelings.

        Sample Direction #1: Reflect on your participation in class today and complete the following statements:

        I learned that I…
        I was surprised that I…
        I noticed that I…
        I discovered that I…
        I was pleased that I…

        Sample Direction #2: Describe how you feel about solving _________ problem.

    • Have students write a “mathography”-a paragraph or so in which they describe their feelings about and experiences in math, both in and out of school. (This is a good tool to get to know students early in the year, and to make comparisons later when looking for signs of progress.

    • Find ways to keep students writing for the allotted time:

    • Getting Students to Write about Familiar Mathematical Ideas

    • Once your students have become accustomed to writing about their attitudes and feelings toward mathematics in their journals, they are ready to write about simple, familiar math concepts. It is important not to make the writing too difficult by asking them to write about unfamiliar math ideas. Using writing to review familiar math ideas will increase confidence and skill in writing as well as revisit important math concepts.

      Sample Directions:

      Explain in your own words what subtraction means.
      Explain what is most important to understand about fractions.

    • Use student writing samples to help them refine their writing.

    • Introduce the term metacognition to help students understand the reason and audience for their writing.

      • When you feel your students are ready, ask them to write about more complex mathematical ideas, including concepts being taught at their current grade level. To help you move your students into this more advanced level of writing about their thinking. Here are some other suggestions to help you:

        1. Encourage your students to use drawings and graphs to explain their thinking.

        • Research shows that using simple visual aids (diagrams, graphs, etc.) improves mathematical problem-solving ability, especially in female students.

        2. As student writing progresses, ask students to write about their small group work.

        • Ask the group to write a summary of how they reached a solution, including any “false starts” or “dead ends.”
        • Ask each individual to write an explanation of the group’s work on a problem. Have the small groups discuss the individual explanations.
        • After a small group assignment, have students “explain and illustrate two different approaches to solving a problem.”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

DiigoNotes – Implementing performance assessment in the classroom

29 Thursday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, MyNotes, OnlineLearning

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  • Implementing performance assessment in the classroom. Brualdi, Amy

    Brualdi, Amy (1998). Implementing performance assessment in the classroom. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 6(2). Retrieved October 29, 2009 from http://PAREonline.net/getvn.asp?v=6&n=2 . This paper has been viewed 126,806 times since 11/13/1999.

    • it is difficult to write completion or multiple choice tests that go beyond the recall level.

    • Performance-based assessments “represent a set of strategies for the . . . application of knowledge, skills, and work habits through the performance of tasks that are meaningful and engaging to students” (Hibbard and others, 1996, p. 5). This type of assessment provides teachers with information about how a child understands and applies knowledge. Also, teachers can integrate performance-based assessments into the instructional process to provide additional learning experiences for students.

    • The benefit of performance-based assessments are well documented. However, some teachers are hesitant to implement them in their classrooms. Commonly, this is because these teachers feel they don’t know enough about how to fairly assess a student’s performance (Airasian,1991). Another reason for reluctance in using performance-based assessments may be previous experiences with them when the execution was unsuccessful or the results were inconclusive (Stiggins, 1994). The purpose of this digest is to outline the basic steps that you can take to plan and execute effective performance-based assessments.

      • What concept, skill, or knowledge am I trying to assess?
      • What should my students know?
      • At what level should my students be performing?
      • What type of knowledge is being assessed: reasoning, memory, or process (Stiggins, 1994)?

    • There are some things that you must take into account before you choose the activity: time constraints, availability of resources in the classroom, and how much data is necessary in order to make an informed decision about the quality of a student’s performance (This consideration is frequently referred to as sampling.).

    • The literature distinguishes between two types of performance-based assessment activities that you can implement in your classroom: informal and formal (Airasian, 1991; Popham, 1995; Stiggins, 1994).

    • When a student is being informally assessed, the student does not know that the assessment is taking place. As a teacher, you probably use informal performance assessments all the time.

    • A student who is being formally assessed knows that you are evaluating him/her. When a student’s performance is formally assessed, you may either have the student perform a task or complete a project. You can either observe the student as he/she performs specific tasks or evaluate the quality of finished products.

    • You must beware that not all hands-on activities can be used as performance-based assessments (Wiggins, 1993). Performance-based assessments require individuals to apply their knowledge and skills in context, not merely completing a task on cue.

      • Identify the overall performance or task to be assessed, and perform it yourself or imagine yourself performing it
      • List the important aspects of the performance or product.
      • Try to limit the number of performance criteria, so they can all be observed during a pupil’s performance.
      • If possible, have groups of teachers think through the important behaviors included in a task.
      • Express the performance criteria in terms of observable pupil behaviors or product characteristics.
      • Don’t use ambiguous words that cloud the meaning of the performance criteria.
      • Arrange the performance criteria in the order in which they are likely to be observed.

    • allow your students to participate in this process

    • asking the students to name the elements of the project/task that they would use to determine how successfully it was completed (Stix, 1997).

    • A rubric is a rating system by which teachers can determine at what level of proficiency a student is able to perform a task or display knowledge of a concept. With rubrics, you can define the different levels of proficiency for each criterion. Like the process of developing criteria, you can either utilize previously developed rubrics or create your own. When using any type of rubric, you need to be certain that the rubrics are fair and simple. Also, the performance at each level must be clearly defined and accurately reflect its corresponding criterion (or subcategory)

    • As with criteria development, allowing your students to assist in the creation of rubrics may be a good learning experience for them. You can engage students in this process by showing them examples of the same task performed/project completed at different levels and discuss to what degree the different elements of the criteria were displayed. However, if your students do not help to create the different rubrics, you will probably want to share those rubrics with your students before they complete the task or project.

      • Checklist Approach When you use this, you only have to indicate whether or not certain elements are present in the performances.
      • Narrative/Anecdotal Approach When teachers use this, they will write narrative reports of what was done during each of the performances. From these reports, teachers can determine how well their students met their standards.
      • Rating Scale Approach When teachers use this, they indicate to what degree the standards were met. Usually, teachers will use a numerical scale. For instance, one teacher may rate each criterion on a scale of one to five with one meaning “skill barely present” and five meaning “skill extremely well executed.”
      • Memory Approach When teachers use this, they observe the students performing the tasks without taking any notes. They use the information from their memory to determine whether or not the students were successful. (Please note that this approach is not recommended.)

    • teachers may wish to allow students to assess them themselves. Permitting students to do this provides them with the opportunity to reflect upon the quality of their work and learn from their successes and failures.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

DiigoNotes – iNACOL’s Susan Patrick on Trends in eLearning

29 Thursday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in MyNotes

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Great responses on Susan Patrick’s part to David Nagel’s interview. I am convinced that we need to abandon the failed technology integration approaches of the last 17 years and switch to online learning. If we were looking for a  movement to get behind, it’s clearly not Web 2.0 or Read/Write Web as powerful as that is…it is using these tools within the context of online learning to rethink what we do "for school."

Thanks to Nagel and THE Journal for this interview!

  • Q&A: iNACOL’s Susan Patrick on Trends in eLearning — THE Journal

    • Q&A: iNACOL’s Susan Patrick on Trends in eLearning

    • By David Nagel

    • At last count, there were more than 1 million enrollments in K-12 online schools in the United States. And according to recent research, the number of students taking courses online will jump to more than 10 million in the next five years.

    • iNACOL, the International Association for K-12 Online Learning. iNACOL is an advocacy and research organization that focuses on issues in K-12 online schooling. It represents a broad spectrum of groups centered around education, including schools themselves, state and local education agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, and various technology and content providers. Just this month, iNacol released the first-ever standards for K-12 online education programs, National Standards for Quality Online Programs.

    • The first online programs in K-12 education really started in the mid-1990s. Florida Virtual School and Kentucky Virtual School started in 1996. By 2000, there were about 40,000 enrollments in K-12 online learning–the estimate’s between 40,000 and 50,000 enrollments nationwide. By 2002, there were 300,000 enrollments in K-12 online learning. By 2005, there were 500,000 enrollments. And the last data that came out last year shows that in 2007 there were more than a million enrollments in K-12 online learning.

    • For an innovation in K-12 education to grow that rapidly–it’s growing at more than 30 percent annually–is remarkable

    • National surveys show that more than 40 percent of middle and high school students want to take an online course.

    • The No. 1 reason for a school district to offer an online course is that the course is otherwise unavailable.

    • There are major teacher shortages of math and science [teachers] all over the country, [as well as teachers of] foreign languages…. Forty percent of high schools do not offer AP classes.

    • The second thing is it’s really helping to meet the individual needs of students. The traditional model of education is to line 30 kids up in a classroom and teach one way–through lecture–to all of those students with one single textbook. Online learning allows a level of customization and personalization that is otherwise really impossible because of time constraints and capital constraints.

    • [it] is allowing a level of personalization, of flexibility [that’s really] allowing students to go deeper than they ever have before.

    • Online learning is the solution for extending learning time….

      The Silent Epidemic study [from] the Gates Foundation [showed] 88 percent of [dropouts] had passing grades and could have finished, but they’re dropping out because they’re disenfranchised. They feel like they’re not challenged. They wish classes were more rigorous. If we keep doing the same thing and just hold them in school for longer hours, to me that doesn’t make any sense.

    • taking students only from the neighborhood [in which the graduation rate was] only 40 percent, taking those students and retraining teachers to use online courses and and all of these collaboration and discussion tools. In a traditional class, it’s not cool in their neighborhood to raise their hand and have a lot of discussion, so they’re doing these … silent chats, silent discussions, where they’re taking the online coursework and having discussions. The teachers think it’s amazing because instead of just having one kid raise their hand, they’ve got 15 different students posting and sharing ideas and making it relevant to their world, and they’re getting so much deeper. After the first year, they’ve got more than 80 percent of their kids on track for graduating on time and getting accepted to college.

    • It’s a redesign of the instructional strategy and a redesign of the curriculum away from "stand and deliver" in a single textbook to [focusing on] what … you really need to do to engage these students and make them active learners who want to be successful in their own lives.

    • The two biggest issues are the funding and the licensure…. It’s really the adults learning what online learning is. There’s still this misconception in K-12 education that there’s a computer screen teaching your student, not that you’re connected to a teacher that’s leading discussion, that’s monitoring your homework, that’s doing some live, interactive sessions with you on a whiteboard.

    • A lot of counselors understand intuitively that when a student is advanced and [wants] to take an AP course, they’re comfortable with that. But the opportunities for credit recovery for struggling students to have this more personalized dynamic interaction, a lot of people don’t understand how helpful it can be.

    • it really comes down to [policymakers adopting] a broader perspective of what’s possible in the 21st century.

    • through online learning, K-12 teachers have opportunities to teach one course part-time or be adjunct faculty members or teach full-time and switch their load up so they teach some classes online and some classes face to face.

    • There’s a study called Going Virtual! that shows that the average teacher going online has more than seven years of experience. A lot of people left the classroom with all of those years of experience because [of] the environment they were in–a lack of leadership support, whatever reason they left for–are applying at virtual schools, getting retrained to teach online, and then love that added flexibility that they have.

    • Susan Lowes at Columbia University did some research on this and showed that [K-12 teachers are] bringing those technology tools and the new strategies using the Internet back into their face-to-face classes, and it’s actually improving the overall teaching and their skill sets and how they can do discussions different ways.

    • [based on] the work from the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, we lose 30 percent of our new teachers within three years and 50 percent of our new teachers within five years in K-12 education. I wouldn’t say that the virtual school teachers’ retention rates are any worse than that.

    • Taking a really great teacher and then giving them a bunch of technology tools so that that same group of students can do more is fine. But making fundamental shifts in access and teacher quality and how we design education to me is a lot more interesting.

    • If you train somebody how to fully teach online, then they can use those skills in a classroom or virtually.

    • if our digital investments are really underutilized, we really need to look at ways that can profoundly change the learning environment and make sure that those investments are sound.

    • The sunken costs of technology in higher ed also support online learning. That’s ubiquitous high-speed broadband. Eighty-three percent of college classes use a learning management system, whether they’re face to face or otherwise. And that training for the faculty to use that learning management system–even to post their syllabus or assignments or other things like that–[is] really the first step in that direction. Whereas the sunken costs in school districts and states on technology don’t always support virtual learning. You have to find a whole new pocket of money. And to me there’s a real disconnect there.

    • Teacher shortages are a major problem. It is a solution for teacher shortages, changing the distribution of teachers.

      Engagement is a huge problem for students in the current model. Dynamic online courses and curriculum and training teachers in new strategies to improve that engagement and personalize instruction: [online learning] is a huge solution for that.

    • Omaha Public Schools just switched all of their credit recovery and remediation in summer schools into online format. They’re … using MITE open courseware to do that. So those are some solutions to major problems that are happening in our schools.

    • There are huge opportunities in connecting students globally…. The International Baccalaureate program, which is one of our members, they have started an IB diploma program online, and they have students from 125 different countries participating, collaborating, sharing ideas, communicating, building their second language fluency. Giving kids opportunities that are truly globally connected and academic in nature, I think, is so important in the world that we live in.

    • There’s a study called the Florida TaxWatch Report on the Florida Virtual School [downloadable in PDF form here, approx. 800 KB] that compared all the data both for the AP courses and for the end of course exams in Florida and found that Florida Virtual School, through their online courses, was serving a higher number of minority and underserved students than traditional schools, and those students were performing better on the AP exams than traditional students in traditional schools and better on end of course exams.

    • The study found the average AP exam score for FLVS students was 3.05 versus 2.49 for public school students. FCAT reading and math results were also markedly better for FLVS students than for public school students. Complete details and caveats can be found in the report itself.]

    • Every major study that’s been done has shown that online learning is "as good as or better" when based on student achievement. And this last report that … came out of the Department of Ed [early this summer] shows that it’s better. And considering that kids wouldn’t have access to these classes anyway, even if they were just as good, that would be a huge step in the right direction. But the fact that they’re actually academically more engaging and better is a real sign that we can learn things and shift things.

    • Dave Nagel is the executive editor for 1105 Media’s online education publications and electronic newsletters. He can be reached at dnagel@1105media.com. He can now be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/THEJournalDave (K-12) or http://twitter.com/CampusTechDave (higher education).

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

DiigoNotes -Lawsuit Facebook

27 Tuesday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in CyberBullying, Education, MyNotes, Web2.0

≈ Leave a comment

  • Hey, kids! Hate school? Don’t tell Facebook! – Technotica- msnbc.com

    • High school sucks. Did you forget? Don’t believe it? Check out Facebook.

    • At least that’s the opinion of a Nicholas Blacconiere, an academy student under legal fire for enshrining his negative opinions and those of others on a private page he posted on the world’s most popular social networking site.

    • “Facebook ‘suck sites’ to be tested in court,” proclaimed the Chicago Tribune in reporting the academy’s $50,000 suit against Blacconiere for unauthorized use of the school’s logo and for emotional damage caused by defamatory comments posted on his page, titled “Tspa RobinHood.”

      Other media followed suit, with headlines such as “ ‘My School Sucks’ pages under attack,” and the like. Why it’s as if just now, a couple of months short of 2010, the First Amendment rights of Internet-savvy students are under fire and not, in fact, an ongoing and troublesome issue.

    • “Forty years ago, the Supreme Court resoundingly affirmed that young people attending public schools do not ‘shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,’ ” writes Frank D. LoMonte in “Reaching Through the School House Gate: Students’ Eroding First Amendment Right,” his February 2009 brief for the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.

      Recent developments in the law of online speech, however, are rattling the certainty of that assumption,” the Student Press Law Center executive director continues. “In the view of at least some federal judges, students do not enjoy — anywhere, anytime —the same right to comment on school as ordinary citizens.”

    • It was hardly the first Facebook page posted by a disgruntled student. Even now, a Facebook search for “student organizations” with “high school” and “sucks” in the title returns hundreds of results augmented with the names of specific schools, pages that have been online for months, even years.

    • “It is ironic that high school is where students first learn about First Amendment rights, including the right to free speech, yet it is Katy’s high school that unconstitutionally trampled those very rights,” ACLU cooperating attorney Matthew D. Bavaro, said in a press release announcing the suit last December.

    • Appeals are still pending for the case of Avery Doninger, who in 2007 was not permitted to run for senior class secretary after she referred to faculty at Lewis Mills High School in Burlington, Conn., as “douchebags” on her LiveJournal blog. Faculty called the student, who’d previously never been in trouble, a cyberbully.

    • “You have sort of an Orwellian atmosphere at universities, and especially at high schools, Shibley says. “Administrators feel they have to tamp down (online speech) or somebody’s going to sue the high school.”

      “It’s a big mess, and it’s just coming out everywhere.”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

TCEA Area 20 Council

26 Monday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, Leadership, TCEA

≈ Leave a comment

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to participate in the TCEA Area 9 Conference in Jacksboro, Texas. It was a fun event for me–I moodled all day; check here for workshop materials–and I had the opportunity to meet folks like Don Sewell (TCEA Area 9 Director).

One of the intriguing conversations I had on Saturday was with members of the TCEA Area 9 Council, which evidently had been around for quite a few years. It is something I’ve admired from afar in Area 20.

The benefits of an Area Council for TCEA Area 9 included the following:

  • Scholarships for students
  • Officers to serve on Area Council
  • Better representation from local districts
  • Organization of area events

Area Councils are provided for in the TCEA organization bylaws:

ARTICLE VIII. AREA COUNCIL

Section 1. Area Council Members

The Area Council shall consist of the Area Director, who shall serve as chairperson, and members recruited from the general membership of that area.

Section 2. Qualifications for Area Council

Any Regular Member, who is a teacher, administrator, or other employee of an educational entity in the state of Texas, shall be eligible to serve on the Area Council. Area Council members must reside or be employed in the TCEA area they serve.

Section 3. Terms of Area Council Members

Membership on the Area Council shall be reviewed annually by the Area Director.

Section 4. Selection of Area Council Members

The Area Director shall recruit and appoint Council members from the general membership of that Area. An equitable geographic balance shall be maintained, insofar as possible. The Council may establish an officer structure comparable to the existing structure of TCEA.

Section 5. Duties of the Area Council

Area Council members shall assist the Area Director in planning, organizing, and implementing Area activities, promoting Area membership, contributing to the TCEA communications network, budgeting and directing the Area funds, working on various committees as assigned, and promoting the use of computers and technology in educational settings.

Section 6. Duties of the Area Director

The Area Director organizes specialized Area activities, promotes Area membership, contributes to the TCEA communications network, budgets and directs the Area funds, works on various committees as assigned, chairs the Area Council, advises Local Chapters, in that Area, and promotes the use of computers and technology in educational settings.

What are your thoughts about establishing a TCEA Area 20 Council? Is that something of interest and worthwhile?


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

DiigoNotes – Building an Effective Board of Directors

26 Monday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in MyNotes

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What a phenomenal article by Frank Martinelli (Texas NonProfits) on building an effective Board of Directors! I really enjoyed reading some of the strategies suggested by Frank and there are some obvious connections/suggestions applicable to the work of organizations I’m familiar with, such as TCEA, that I’m hoping to be elected to office for. These points are ones I’m going to keep in mind as I pursue elected office with TCEA, but you know what, these are just excellent suggestions for ANYONE who gets elected to Board or is interested in holding their Board members accountable.

While I cite other key take-aways from the article below via my DiigoNotes, I found four critical take-aways for me that made me leap out of my chair. Those take-aways included the following:

  1. Your Board of Directors needs to have a plan for ROTATION of Board members. One of the big problems with some organizations–such as TCEA–is the lack of term limits. This means Board members hang around forever and no fresh ideas are introduced, even if the Board members are committed individuals…failure to get new Board members results in a “closed” Board. Valuable, valuable feedback for any organization and its membership!
  2. The need for a public and easily available, written job description for Board Members. One of the frustrating things about running for TCEA office is that you’re elected to serve on the Board by the membership in your geographic area, however, there is no job description (that I’m aware of) posted for being a Board member where it’s easily accessible to all. While I’m sure there must be a job description somewhere, I hope new Board members aren’t confronted with one immediately prior to “swearing in” and expected to agree to it. I love this quote:

    “prospective board members want to know what is expected of them along with an estimate of the required time. Avoid the temptation to downplay the responsibilities of board membership. New board members will eventually find out what the true expectations are and if they are different from what they were told before coming on to the board, you’re in trouble! “

  3. Follow effective committee structure. In my experience (not being organization specific in this critique, so don’t misunderstand), ad-hoc committees are poorly organized and thrown together at the last minute. It usually falls on the person chosen to chair the committee to draft the members, usually using up “favors” or relying on friendship to pull together. I like the author’s discussion of six elements of successful, effective committees, as well as committee member selection as shared below:

    They can be a mix of board and non-board members and should be recruited with the following question in mind: What tasks is the committee responsible for and who among our members and supporters possess the skills and experience needed to complete those tasks? As is the case with other forms of volunteer recruitment, every effort should be made to match the needs and requirements of the committee and the skills, knowledge and interests of prospective committee members.

  4. Creating a matrix of current Board members skills. Wow, what a great idea to better get to know what people know how to do and can do. Consider these instructions:

    Key factors that define sought-after expertise, knowledge, skills, experience, as well as relevant demographic factors are arranged along the top of the matrix. The names of current board members are listed down the side of the matrix. The Committee then uses the matrix to complete the profile.

There are many other great nuggets of information in Martinelli’s “Building an Effective Board of Directors,” including the self-assessment tool for Board members. Here are my notes and, of course, you’re encouraged to read the full article and check out the tools included at the end of the article.

  • Texas Non Profits – Building an Effective Board of Directors – Lessons and Great Forms, Agendas, and a Pledge

    • The first, planning and policy development, includes determining the mission and vision that charts the future direction of the organization.

    • The second area, community and organizational development, means broadening the organization’s base of support in the community; interacting with the community to bring new issues, opportunities and community needs to the attention of organization; maintaining accountability to the public, funders, members, and clients. It also includes training and developing current and new leaders within the board and committees, and assuring that the same development is occurring within the professional staff through the leadership of the Executive Director.

    • The third area, fundraising and support development, includes giving personal time and money; developing donors, members, and supporters; leading and supporting fundraising campaigns and events as well as maintaining accountability to donors and funders.

    • If the Board is going to make decisions that reflect the true interests and needs of the organization’s constituents, board members must be in tune with those constituents and the wider community of which they are apart. If the Board is expected to raise funds to support the programs and services of the organization, then board members must be involved in planning and decision-making in meaningful ways so as to feel in a strong sense of individual and collective ownership. If the organization is counting on board members to raise funds from the community, then board members need to maintain relationships with individuals and institutions in that community.

    • Barriers to Board Effectiveness

    • Temptation to micro-management.

    • It is critical that the board focuses its attention on items of critical importance to the organization. In order to do this, the board must avoid the temptation to micro-manage or meddle in lesser matters or in areas that are more appropriately handled by the professional staff.

    • Ineffective Nominating Committee

    • the work of the nominating committee has lasting impact on organization — and this committee’s work determines who board leaders will be for many years for years into the future. The nominating committee should be well organized, have a clear sense of recruiting priorities as well as expectations for individual board members especially in the area of fund-raising.

    • the lack of a plan for orderly rotation of board members on and off the board. If the same people serve year after year, there is no way for new blood and new ideas to come into the board. Despite their sense of commitment, these same people will make the organization a “closed corporation.” Rotation prevents the ingrown possessiveness sometimes found on self-perpetuating boards. In a time of rapid change, the presence of new people who bring a new perspective will promote creativity and innovation in board decision-making.

    • No Plan for Rotation.

    • Failure to remove unproductive members. Another problem that leads to poor performance is the failure to remove unproductive board members. People who are not carrying out their commitments as board members become major blocks to overall board effectiveness. There needs to be a process for evaluating board member performance and making recommendations regarding their future service with the board.

    • Too small. Sometimes a board is ineffective because it is simply too small in number. When we consider the awesome responsibilities of board leadership, it’s easy to see why we need enough people to do the work. While it is difficult to specify an appropriate size for all boards, in general, a board should range in number from 11 to 21 members. We need enough members to lead and form the core of the committees and, in general, share in the other work of the board. We also need sufficient numbers to reflect the desired diversity in the board as well as assure the range of viewpoints that spurs innovation and creativity in board planning and decision-making.

    • Lack of functioning committee structure. The lack of a functioning committee structure is another reason why boards fail to perform at an acceptable level. While it is true that major decisions are made in board meetings, it is also true is that most of the work that supports and implements this decision-making occurs at the committee level. If the board has a committee structure that functions inadequately, this can lead to poor performance in general.

    • No strategic plan. The lack of a strategic plan, in most cases, will also lead to poor board performance. If the organization lacks a strategic plan that provides clear direction — so critical in this period of rapid change — the board can spend significant amounts of time talking about topics that simply don’t matter. Related to the absence of a strategic plan is the lack of a long-range service delivery and financial development plan that will advance the strategic plan.

    • No plan for orientation of new and old members. Boards also fail because they have no plan for orientation of new and old members.

    • Who will be serving on and leading the board over the next five years? What is our plan to scout board leadership talent for the future? How will we go about fostering and developing future board leadership? What we’re really talking about here is extending the timeline for board development and recruitment activities. In many organizations, board recruitment and nominations activities are really ad hoc in nature. Typical bylaw language describes a process in which the board president appoints a nominations committee whose short-term task is to recruit candidates that will fill a specified number of vacancies at the upcoming annual meeting.

    • Year-round committee.

    • Board Development Committee because developing leaders includes more than nominating people to serve on our boards. It truly is a year-round function: prospecting, contacting, recruiting, orienting, supporting, providing ongoing training, and evaluating.

    • Link to the strategic plan. It is important to match board recruitment and development activities with the new requirements and demands of the strategic plan.

    • The board reviews the mission, vision, goals and strategies, and then determines any new skills, knowledge, personal contacts and other attributes future board members will need to possess in order for the board to do its part in advancing the strategic plan.

    • Profile of the current board

    • Key factors that define sought-after expertise, knowledge, skills, experience, as well as relevant demographic factors are arranged along the top of the matrix. The names of current board members are listed down the side of the matrix. The Committee then uses the matrix to complete the profile.

    • Focused recruiting priorities.

    • Written member job description.

    • For a board to operate successfully each member must understand and accept the specific duties and responsibilities that come with board member ship. More and more organizations have found it helpful to develop a written statement of agreement for board members. This statement serves as a job description and clarifies board responsibilities. The job description, in very clear language, sets forth the expectations the organization has of its board members. The most effective job descriptions are those that state in behavioral terms precisely what board members are expected to do.

    • For most organizations, key responsibilities include the following: consistently attendance at regular board meetings, participation as an active member on it least one committee, participation in the fund-raising activities of the organization in a manner appropriate for that board member, as well as preparation in advance before regular board meetings by reading and studying materials sense in advance regarding key actions the board is expected to take at the next meeting.

    • many organizations now expect their board members to attend an annual board planning or education event sometimes held on an evening, or a weekend.

    • New board members will eventually find out what the true expectations are and if they are different from what they were told before coming on to the board, you’re in trouble! It includes some of the basic expectations that most organizations have for their board members. It is not intended to serve the needs of every organization; consider the starting point in the design of a job description that matches your needs.

    • the Executive Committee consists of the four executive officers of the Board: the president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer. Sometimes other members of the board are included as part of the Executive Committee: for example chairs of the standing committees or at-large members from the board to assure representation of diverse viewpoints.

    • The Executive Committee plays three critical roles: planning the agenda of board meetings, making decisions on behalf of the full board, and serving as a communication link with other members of the board, especially the committee chairs.

    • Making decisions on behalf of the full board: In between the regular meetings of the board, the Executive Committee, during its own meeting, is able to make decisions that can’t wait for the next regular board meeting or on matters that the full board has delegated authority to the Executive Committee. In both cases, the Executive Committee receives its authority from the full board and needs to report on its decision-making at the subsequent meeting of the board.

    • To facilitate its work, the Executive Committee should meet on a regular basis.

    • When the Executive Director and board president meet, they should begin by identifying agenda items that can be appropriately handled by the Executive Committee itself. These items would be placed on the Executive Committee’s meeting agenda than as action items. In placing such items in this category, board president and Executive Director are assuming, based on past practice as well as relevant bylaw language and board policy, that such items are appropriate for Executive Committee decision-making. The next agenda category includes those items that would be appropriate for executive committee discussion and/or referral to the full board as action items or as information items. In this instance, the Board President and Executive Director are making the judgment that that the executive committee lacks authority to act directly on such items. Their discussion of such items during the Executive Committee meeting may lead to recommendations for future action by the board as a whole but the Executive Committee will stop short of making a decision on its own.

    • The Committee Structure

    • An effective committee structure helps to increase the involvement of board members because it gives them an opportunity to use their skills and experience. They provide a training ground for future leaders — both for individuals who are currently board members as well as non-board members who may be asked to serve on the board in the future. They increase the visibility and outreach of the organization by including non-board members in committee membership. Committees provide a means for information to flow from the community, clients, and line staff to the board. Committees also give members the chance to freely and discuss issues in an informal setting. Finally, committees serve as excellent problem-solving and decision-making groups because of their small size.

    • Written Committee Description. First, there should be a written description of what is expected of each committee to guide the chair and members. The description should summarize the purpose of the committee, its composition and selection procedure, and the specific duties of the committee.

    • An effective committee chair. The next element is an effective chairperson. In general, the committee chair should a board member.

    • Members thoughtfully appointed. The next element of committee effectiveness is members who have been thoughtfully appointed. Each standing committee is generally composed of a core of five to eight members. They can be a mix of board and non-board members and should be recruited with the following question in mind: What tasks is the committee responsible for and who among our members and supporters possess the skills and experience needed to complete those tasks? As is the case with other forms of volunteer recruitment, every effort should be made to match the needs and requirements of the committee and the skills, knowledge and interests of prospective committee members.

    • Accountability to the board. The next element of committee effectiveness is clear accountability to the Board of Directors. This begins with a written committee description that describes what the board expects from the committee. There should also be an effort to link the committee description with relevant strategic plan language.

    • Well — run meetings. The last element of committee effectiveness is well run meetings. In a sense, if a committee reflects the first five indicators of effectiveness — a clear description of its work, a chair that knows how to lead, a solid match between the interests, skills and experience of individual members on the one hand, and the needs and requirements of the committee on the other, a good mix of board and non-board members, and direct accountability to the board –we will have the makings of excellent committee meetings. It will still be important to provide for meeting space that matches the needs of the group, a written meeting agenda and any necessary information mailed out to members in advance of the meeting.

    • An effective board evaluation process includes the following features:

    • Annual process. An effective process for self-evaluation of the board will be conducted on a regular, yearly basis.

    • Two-way Communication. In order to have board member support for the process, the evaluation will need to be viewed as a vehicle for two-way communication to provide feedback on performance to individual board members and also to solicit feedback from individual board members on the performance of a board as a whole and the level of support that they receive from their leaders as well as staff.

    • Follow-through. An effective evaluation process will also lead to concrete plans for corrective action including a commitment on the part of the board to follow through so that the results of evaluation process lead to measurable improvements in board performance.

    • Board member accountability. The results of this assessment can then used by the President and Executive Committee to determine which board members deserve positive feedback for acceptable performance and which board members, because of inadequate performance, need to be reminded of their responsibilities.

    • Just-in-time Board Orientation

    • Another component of board effectiveness is training and orientation provided in a timely manner. The problem for many organizations is that it can sometimes take new board members several months and even a full year before they begin to function effectively in their role as board members.

    • Here’s how such a board orientation program might work: even before a prospective board member is voted on to the board, he or she will receive detailed information about the organization, the workings of the board, expectations for individual board members, and other vital information. An effective “just-in-time” board orientation program will also focus on the strategic plan of the organization.

    • The first is a thoughtful nominations and recruitment process that is viewed as parts of a broader effort to identify, involve, and develop board leadership. The second is the presence of an executive committee that facilitates the effective decision-making on the part of a board is a whole. The third practice is establishment of a committee structure.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Cheating in Online Student Assessment: Beyond Plagiarism

26 Monday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in EdTech

≈ Leave a comment

  • Cheating in Online Student Assessment: Beyond Plagiarism

    • Neil C. Rowe

    • ncrowe@nps.edu

    • The prevention of plagiarism has been the subject of much attention, but insufficient attention has been given to other problems of dishonesty in online assessment. We survey the types of problems that can occur and what can be done about them. We believe many educators are unaware of these problems, and most countermeasures proposed are insufficient.

    • When a student scores well for an online assessment, does that mean that they know the material?

    • Traditional assessment also requires costs: the time of human proctors, care in control of the assessment materials before and after administration, and grading effort, all of which are simplified in online assessment. But can we trust the results?

    • Unfortunately, often we cannot. Everybody lies at one time or another (Ford, 1996), and cheating is common in education (Cizek, 1999; Lathrop and Foss, 2000; Dick et al, 2003). (Bushweller, 1999) cites disturbing statistics such as that 70% of American high school seniors admit to cheating on at least one test, and 95% of the students who said they cheated were never caught. (Dick et al, 2003) reports 12 studies of cheating, mostly with college students, in which an average of 75% of students reported cheating sometime during their college career. Cizek (1999) also reports that cheating increased significantly in the second half of the twentieth century, and that cheating increases with the age of the student at least through age 25, which could have serious implications for distance learning with its often-older students. Cheating also has been observed to increase as the bandwidth (information per second) of the communications channel between assessor and assessee decreases; that is, people who feel more "distant" cheat more (George and Carlson, 1999; Burgoon et al, 2003). Online assessment has a narrower bandwidth than classroom assessment (instructors cannot watch students work, for instance) and the previous results suggest this might make cheating easier.

    • In addition, students often have less commitment to the integrity of distance-learning programs than traditional programs because distance-learning programs often lack tradition, are often taken by people with pressures from other jobs, and many programs are new and not fully debugged. In general, cheaters often point to factors like these that facilitate cheating (Bell and Whaley, 1991)

    • Some attention has been paid to the increased ease of text plagiarism using the Internet (McMurtry, 2001; Heberling, 2002) but little to the problems of focused assessments using instruments such as multiple-choice and calculation questions, necessary in most science and engineering courses.

    • Group projects can reduce cheating if students monitor one another, but group projects are not appropriate for many subjects and learning skills. Others have argued that assessment should be continuous so it is less cost-effective for students to cheat (Bork, 2001). This does require considerable work in setting up a course. It also gives students less opportunity to study and digest the material at their own paces, a key feature of self-education. It creates more of a climate of distrust, suggesting that students cannot be trusted to learn without constant testing. It is also logically impossible to simultaneously satisfy three important criteria for continuous assessment: That the assessments are of equal size, that the assessments test all material of the course to the same degree, and that each assessment tests some material covered before the previous assessment (see Appendix).

    • While an explicit cheating policy, as well as the very act of testing, could make testees distrustful because suspicion shown to someone decreases their trust (Sztompka, 1999), assessment is central to education because the main purpose of an educational institution is to validate student knowledge

    • Some anecdotal evidence (Kaczmarczyk, 2001) suggests students today cheat less in distance learning than with traditional instruction. This may be because new technologies typically first attract smarter and more motivated users with less reason to cheat.

    • Problem 1: Getting assessment answers in advance

    • it is hard to ensure all students take them simultaneously (Olt, 2002)

    • An interesting idea is to reward by a grading factor those answers that are the most atypical, but that will not work when there is only one correct or good answer.

    • If all-at-once assessment with a single test is not possible, assessment questions can be drawn from a large pool and each student given a random selection

    • it is hard to grade students fairly when they get different questions since some students will get harder questions than others. A way to reduce unfairness is to ask many questions, but then assessments become long and tedious.

    • A more serious problem with pools is that instructors systematically underestimate how large the pool must be to make negligible the overlap of questions between tests.

    • If M is the number of questions on a test and N is the number of questions in the pool, the expected number of questions in common between two randomly chosen test sets is approximately M*(M/N).

    • Even when students cannot guess the instructor’s password, they can use "social engineering" methods that have been successfully used to scam even smart people into revealing their passwords, like "emergency" calls from alleged programming staff or "please change your password temporarily for system testing" requests (Mitnick, 2002). Since few instructors are security experts, they can fall for many of these scams.

    • Even if students take an assessment simultaneously and the instructor’s password is adequately protected, students can use "spyware" to electronically sneak a look at how other students are answering questions during an assessment or what the instructor is typing on their computer. Spyware is software that secretly sends messages about you to other people. It has become a problem on the Internet where some free utilities secretly install spyware to send information to advertisers about what sites you are visiting (Mintz, 2002). The software technology of spyware is not difficult, and students who steal test answers could sell them to other students. Students could also use software called "sniffers" (McClure et al, 2001) to decipher the message packets of a local-area network used by fellow students or the instructor and thereby read their answers or passwords. Students could also use a variety of hacker attack methods to gain server-administrator privileges on the course-server machine ("privilege escalation"), just as good as obtaining an instructor password, unless the machine is kept "patched" regularly with operating-system fixes. Students don’t need to be software experts to do these things, just to download software from a Web site and follow a few simple installation instructions, just as how most hackers attacking computer systems don’t understand their attack software because they obtained it from someone else. Installed spyware and sniffers can be recognized by careful computer forensics (Prosise and Mandia, 2003), but it requires some work.

    • When a user logs off a computer, they leave in memory and on disk many records of what they have been working on, and it is not difficult for this information to be retrieved with built-in tools and free software. For instance, a student or instructor working on an assessment over the Web may leave the final version of the pages they downloaded, with their answers, in the cache of their Web browser. Even if the power is turned off, the cache will still remain on disk, and even if files are requested for deletion, operating systems often send them to a "recycle bin" before actually deleting them.

    • Problem 2: Unfair retaking of assessments

    • Another serious problem with online assessment is that it may be possible for students to retake an assessment multiple times until they are satisfied with their performance, even if that was not the intention of the instructor.

    • If the server software is not properly designed, students can break their connection to the server during an assessment, then claim they lost power and test answers and need to start over, giving them extra time to consult collaborators or unauthorized reference materials. Students could also crash (stop) the server after the grading is done but before the grades have been recorded; crashing is not difficult with the many hacker tools currently available. Another trick is to change the system clock so the grading server thinks that a new test assessment is actually prior to an earlier assessment; many operating systems do not adequately control access to their system clock.

    • Password theft of the instructor’s password as discussed above also permits a student to change previous grades, since instructional software must allow instructors to correct grading mistakes. Blackboard doesn’t even bother to tell the instructor when they last logged in, a key clue to this kind of manipulation. Again, computer forensics can detect these unauthorized activities, but this is often not easy.

    • Problem 3: Unauthorized help during the assessment

    • the most serious problem with online assessment is confirming that the student is in fact who they say they are

    • This issue of "authentication" has been subject of much research in computer security, but usually the problem is that of ensuring that a given person is present, not that they are alone, which requires different methods. Note that "high-tech" solutions of infrared or electromagnetic monitoring of test-takers are not adequate for preventing unauthorized collaboration because communication can take many forms including aural, optical, and olfactory

    • One approach is to include some traditional tests in any distance-learning program, as with the Open University, with proctors and the usual test security.

    • It is also possible for one student to impersonate another, so each student will need an identification card and it will need to be checked at the assessment site. Such tests are an imposition on the students and will need to be minimized in number because of their logistics. Hence much is riding on the outcome of these traditional assessments (since a bad score should surely override great scores on online assessments in which we are not sure who is taking the test); students will be under pressure, some students perform unfairly poorly under pressure, and this is a good incentive to cheat.

    • Countermeasures

    • (Cizek, 1999) provides a good overview of methods for recognizing, responding to, and preventing cheating in traditional paper-and-pencil assessments, and many of his insights apply to online cheating.

    • Most distance-learning assessments use multiple-choice, true/false, and matching questions since they are much easier to grade automatically than short-answer and essay questions. Then the number of identical incorrect answers between two students is a good clue, and can be given confidence intervals for a hypothesis of cheating.

    • Define cheating and encourage honesty.

    • Know the assessment takers

    • Understand what students face.

    • Maintain assessment security.

    • Assessment documents should not be stored as files on instructor machines, but only on a server machine, and the server software must be kept up-to-date to minimize hacker attacks to obtain instructor or administrator privileges. The server should have intrusion-detection software to catch attacks before they happen and should do auditing to reveal attacks. The server should also have effective physical security to prevent events like theft of disks. To keep track of all this, the server site must have a designated Security Manager.

    • Proctor the assessment. Proctors not personally related to the student are important when students use computers to do the assessment. Proctors can ensure that students take the assessment at a designated time, without collaborators, and without unauthorized materials.

    • Control the assessment situation. Prohibit all handheld devices (calculators, personal organizers, pagers, cell phones, headphones, etc.) since all can store and transmit information from outside the assessment room (Lathrop and Foss, 2000). If computers are used for the assessment, communication should be made as difficult as possible between them and the rest of the Internet.

    • Make the assessment a learning experience.

    • Use constructed-response test formats.

    • Use varied test formats.

    • Avoid situations that encourage cheating.

    • Plan for the unexpected.

    • Entrapment.

    • a useful way to catch the stealing of tests and answers is to plant fake tests in possibly accessible places, like on the grading server, while keeping the true test offline until test time. Then if a student uses answers from the fake test, we know our security precautions have been faulty and can take measures.

    • we make the following recommendations for online assessment:

    • Human-proctored traditional paper-and-pencil tests with traditional security procedures should be used for major assessments in distance learning.
      • If manual grading is too burdensome, human-proctored tests taken at a computer are a second-best choice provided that the computer’s software and networking capabilities are tightly restricted as described above.
      • If students take the same assessment at different times, it is critical to draw questions randomly from a large pool and reorder them (and answers to multiple-choice questions) randomly.
      • We should automatically and routinely compare answers given by students on assessments. When similarities beyond those due to chance are observed, especially for incorrect answers, it is usually best to just ask students to take a different assessment covering the same material since it is hard to prove guilt. Retaking should be done in a more secure manner than the original test, as for instance with essay questions instead of multiple-choice.
      • Countermeasures for cheating should be a consideration in purchase of distance-learning management software.

    • While there are countermeasures, most are unsatisfactory in some way. For these reasons, online assessment in distance-learning programs should be done with caution until more progress is made on the technical development of countermeasures. Certainly, practice quizzes can continue to be done online, and tests with essay and short-answer questions can be done online if plagiarism safeguards are used and instructors have the time to grade them, but traditional one-location one-time face-to-face testing for much of the student’s grade will need to be the assessment norm for distance learning in the foreseeable future.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

MyNotes – Moodle Certified as SCORM 1.2 Compliant

25 Sunday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in MyNotes

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Found this blog entry to be relevant for those who are concerned about SCORM compliance…and Moodle.

  • Moodle is now certified SCORM 1.2 compliant | E-Learning Curve Blog
    • Moodle is now certified SCORM 1.2 compliant
    • It was just announced on Moodle.org that moodle_logoMoodle 1.9.5 is now “100 per cent” SCORM 1.2 compliant to conformance level LMS-RTE3 (Learning Management System – Run-Time Environment 3). If you want to find out more about the SCORM module in Moodle, you can check out Moodle’s SCORM FAQ and the SCORM module forum.
    • SCORM. The Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) integrates a set of related technical standards, specifications, and  guidelines designed to meet ADL’s functional requirements–accessibility, interoperability, durability, and reusability (the “ilities”).
      • There are numerous benefits to adopting SCORM, and all are related to ADL’s functional requirements for SCORM.

        1. Accessibility:The ability to locate and access instructional components from multiple locations and deliver them to other locations. For example, a content author can search the ADL Registry and identify relevant content that has already been developed by another organization and deploy that content on any LMS that complies with the same version of SCORM to learners anywhere in the world.
        2. Interoperability: The ability to take instructional components developed in one system and use them in another system. For example, content packaged for delivery in one SCORM-compliant LMS could be loaded into another LMS that complies with the same version of SCORM for delivery to learners.
        3. Durability: The ability to withstand technology evolution and/or changes without costly redesign, reconfiguration, or recoding. For example, upgrading to a new computer operating system should have no impact on the delivery of content to learners.
        4. Reusability: The flexibility to incorporate instructional components in multiple applications and contexts. For example, e-learning content designed for one organization can be redeployed, rearranged, repurposed, or rewritten by other organizations that have similar learning needs.
    • Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative. (2009). Frequently Asked Questions about SCORM. [Internet] Available from: http://www.adlnet.gov/Documents/SCORM%20FAQ.aspx Accessed 23rd October 2009

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Learn-e-scapes: Freedom from the Knowledge Giver

23 Friday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, Leadership, OnlineLearning, Transformation

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Source: http://jaxchessnews.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/crowley.jpg

Are we preparing our children for the future? I’m not sure, but I find inspirational assertions like the following one way of managing the unknown possibilities:

In a networked corporation, there is scant difference between knowledge work and learning. Workers become problem solvers and innovators instead of cogs in the machine. The objective is ingenuity, not conformity. Business success depends on them working together rather than as individuals. Collaboration rules. They work and learn in what has been tagged by CLO Magazine as “learnscapes”.

Corporations can create superior “learnscapes” by injecting practices that foster optimal learning: interaction, ease of access, timely reinforcement, peer coaching, and cognitive apprenticeship and so on. Developing and nurturing “learnscapes” is not just something to keep training departments busy; it’s the top responsibility of this group and the ultimate key performance indicator.
Source: Informal Learning

These are ideas that have been around for awhile, at least, long enough to find their way into the literature. In this article on Knowledge Building Paradigm, the authors highlight how businesses are redefining themselves:

many businesses are now finding that the pace of change demanded by the global economy and facilitated by various technologies is requiring them to rethink how they are organized. Many are restructuring themselves as learning organizations—organizations in which new learning and innovation are the engines that drive the company. These companies have flattened layers of management and tend to work in the manner suggested by Kelly (1994), Johnson (2001), and Gloor (2006): bottom-up, swarm-like organizations with fewer hierarchical barriers between ideas and decisions.

and the impact this has on the people who work in such organizations:

Fisher and Fisher (1998) note, “These teams are difficult to describe to outsiders because their membership shifts from time to time, forming and reforming like rapidly splitting amoebas” (106). In this environment, Bennet (2003) notes the need for tools that support collaborative work to virtualize the knowledge of the team, distributing it onto the artifact and thus making it available to all team members…The educational system will have to produce individuals who can work in such organizations and who understand the processes of innovation and creativity.

But consider how educational organizations structure themselves. Often, they are hierarchical, top-down and focus on a central group of people telling the rest how to behave, what to do, what plan to follow. Often, knowledge workers are languishing in their classrooms…and, I’m not referring to the students.

Are we ready in education to prepare learners who understand the processes of innovation and creativity, or are we preparing them to be people who do what they are told to do, when they are told to do it, and to take delight in the creativity of the knowledge-giver?


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

The Tyrant Competente

23 Friday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Followership, Transformation, Transparency

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In a previous blog entry, I shared the concept of Robert Quinn’s Tyranny of Competence. It goes like this:

An individual contributor is a person whose technical competence is judged in terms of singular rather than interdependent action. The more unique the individual output, the more powerful the person becomes. The overapplication of the technical paradigm by an individual can lead to a negative state called the tyranny of competence.

My focus in my previous entry was to help leaders consider the problems with allowing any one person become a “tyrant” due to being so highly technical that they are the ONLY person on the team with the critical job skills. As a person whose motto is “Share More!,” I can’t keep any piece of information useful to the team to myself…I have to share it, whether in cross-training or a published piece (e.g. blog, article for magazine, etc).

Yet, what if we took that idea and applied it to job seekers. Isn’t it safe to say that a person on your team who is highly technical and competent in his position enjoys a certain level of job security? And, isn’t holding on to that job the most important thing in a tough economy? It seems counter-intuitive to practice “sharing” the one or two things that make you highly valued.

In educational technology, though, it’s critical to share your ideas because the shelf life of the skills that make you technically competent is short-lived. We don’t want to find ourselves sitting pretty on Web 1.0 design now that Web 2.0 design is here…what we need to do is keep pushing ourselves, sharing as we go so that we elevate the level of conversation in our field and continue learning.

The problem with this thinking, though, is that I’m a human being. I can’t ALWAYS be learning, right? I mean, at some point, I hit the wall and it becomes a case of diminishing returns. I’m not always going to be young (hey, it’s my birthday today (10/22) and I’m 41) and able to stay up late learning new things and moving ahead. Eventually, sitting by the side of the road and watching the speedsters go by will be fun. While I’m not at that point, I have to try and reconcile this perspective with constant growth.

Reflection on what is being learned is becoming more important. Even as I slow down to “smell the flowers” more, I also find that I have a tremendous amount to share. Though I may do less, what I do can have a deeper, richer flavor because I bring a wealth of experience. The equivalent in writing is rich details interwoven throughout that adds multiple levels of meaning to a piece of writing.

Maybe, being tyranically competent is a worthwhile goal in a tough economy. . .I’m grateful I have the luxury of choosing to share what I learn with as wide an audience as possible without having to worry about becoming irrelevant as a result of that generosity.

What do you think?


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Online Learning Policies

23 Friday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, OIT, OnlineLearning, Texas

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Source: http://www.cincinnatichildrens.org/assets/0/78/315/355/455/457/489/495/67d5db22-c628-4082-b093-2556d90a098d.jpg

In my Online Instructor Training (OIT) class through the Harris County Department of Education (HCDE), during synchronous discussion, the topic came up of misbehavior in online classes. It was a topic I hadn’t spent a lot of time reflecting on since I work with adult learners. I definitely agree with the author cited at the link above:

A well-organized class and a syllabus that clearly lays out the requirements, procedures, and other aspects of the class are necessary elements. In regard to interaction, the instructor also does much to set the tone for the class, and how well one provides feedback is also a critical factor. Training for instructors should address how to organize and manage an online class so as to reduce the odds of miscommunication, and should also help instructors recognize and manage difficulties when they arise.

If an adult learner “misbehaves,” I know exactly what to do: 1) Re-direct; 2) Direct contact; 3) Remove; and if necessary, 4) Contact his supervisor.

With children, though, the contacts appear to be more subtle. Clear expectations up front are critical no matter what the age of the learner. This is why I was grateful to Jeanie Cole (HCDE) for her suggestion that I visit the Florida Virtual School to view these policies:

  • Drop/Withdrawal
  • Code of Conduct
  • Academic Integrity
  • Grading and Final Exam
  • Privacy
  • Expulsion
  • Bullying and Harassment
  • Eligibility, Residency and Age
  • Placement Priority

While each of these has to be adapted, developed for one’s own situation and community, it’s nice to know that we’re not starting from scratch. I encourage Texas districts that have addressed these items to share their policies with the rest of us!


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Testing Moodle for Accessibility

22 Thursday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, Moodle, MoodleConversations, OnlineLearning, Research

≈ 1 Comment

Although I know you’re supposed to design web sites for accessibility, somehow, I hadn’t thought through the issues with accessibility for Moodle. What happens when one of the students–who may be blind–wants to take an online class?

Pretty scary. So, i was grateful to get this article from Diana Benner pointing to an article about testing Moodle for accessibility. Well worth it to read the summary, and then discuss accessibility issues.

  • Testing Moodle for Accessibility

    • Testing Moodle for Accessibility

      • Everyone I encountered and tested said clearly that Moodle was the best Learning Management System they’d used. There are many points in its favor.

        • Moodle is pedagogically sound, designed by people with a passion for education.
        • Moodle is a long-standing and mature product, built by and for its users.
        • Moodle is open source.
        • Moodle is almost pure HTML, relying on standard links and form controls.
        • Moodle avoids common barriers to accessibility like Flash, Java, and image maps.
        • Moodle is relatively well-structured semantically.

        The vast majority of Moodle is technically accessible: blind and vision-impaired users can accomplish nearly all the tasks set before them. However, much work remains to prevent Moodle from being a frustrating experience for these users.

    • Brian Charlson at the Carroll Center for the Blind is fond of saying that sighted users go from the macro to the micro. That is, we scan pages rapidly, building an increasingly accurate mental model as we narrow in on the details. Blind users go from the micro to the macro. They experience only the details, and have to infer relationships between them in order to build a larger picture.

    • Blind users incur a higher cost for failure. It can take a blind user very long to realize that they have performed an incorrect action.

      Working with data tables requires a lot of memorization, even if the tables are well-constructed. Blind users must typically memorize all the headings so they don’t lose their place in the data rows.

    • Blind users set their screen readers to speak very, very fast; much faster than I can comprehend and use.

    • The blind experience on the web is that of swimming in a sea of tiny details, most of which are not relevant to the task at hand. Maddeningly, each of these details must be experienced in full and judgment passed on them not just once, but on every page. The result is that blind users are very quick to skip past any content which appears not to satisfy their immediate goals. This is one reason that good headings are so important.

    • By far the most common complaint of all users tested was, “there’s just too much stuff.” It’s very easy for a sighted user to ignore repeated content, secondary content, and images. Users of assistive technology often do not have this luxury. When making changes to Moodle or adding new features, the most important consideration for accessibility should be to ensure that every readable element on the page is important for all users. If elements are judged not to be important they should be removed, not hidden or placed elsewhere in the layout.

    • This is what screen reader users hear when reading past the help icon when posting a new discussion topic: “Read carefully, Write carefully, Ask good questions, How to write text and Use emoticons.”

    • The Moodle WYSIWYG presents blind users with a large table of unlabeled and inaccessible (e.g., no “alt” attributes) images and form controls. The best case for a blind user is some wasted time figuring out they’re in a WYSIWYG editor and then exiting it.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

MyNotes – Classroom Management Issues in Online Courses

22 Thursday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in MyNotes

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    • Classroom Management Issues in Online Courses: Tips on Mitigating Unwanted Behavior

    • Christopher Hill in Effective Classroom Management, Online Education
    • managing student expectations is a big part of the picture. A well-organized class and a syllabus that clearly lays out the requirements, procedures, and other aspects of the class are necessary elements. In regard to interaction, the instructor also does much to set the tone for the class, and how well one provides feedback is also a critical factor. Training for instructors should address how to organize and manage an online class so as to reduce the odds of miscommunication, and should also help instructors recognize and manage difficulties when they arise.
    • In an online class, one might actually have access to more clues and information from the student’s postings to help fill out the picture than would be the case in a face-to-face class. In most cases, the instructor should first seek to clarify the situation by personally emailing the student. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of explaining the requirements or offering additional assistance. Or a student might not be aware of the impression their postings in discussion might have made on classmates. A phone call, real-time chat or IM or even a Skype session with video cam might be used to facilitate engagement with the student.
    • Q: What are a couple of the most common “difficult” behaviors that online teachers face with online students?
      Ko: Many of these are the same as one would encounter face-to-face, but are simply manifested in different ways online. For example, there are students who disappear from the class and then suddenly reappear, students who dominate all discussion; students who don’t hold up their end of work in group assignments, and of course, the procrastinators and those who don’t follow directions. While some problems are easily recognized, others may be more difficult to detect online.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Windows Admin Password – Recovering It

22 Thursday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Privacy, TechTips, WindowsOS

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A colleague asked me as we tried to work on a computer, “How do I recover my admin password on Windows?” As I stumbled to remember the answer, I googled myself and found a posting I’d written some time ago:

At Daily Cup of Tech, Tim begins with this disclaimer…

I want to start this article off by saying that the information contained in this article may be of a controversial nature. But, I want to just remind everyone that information in and of itself is amoral; that is, it is neither good nor evil. It is only what someone decides to do with this information that can be good or evil. It is my sincerest hope that you will choose to make the world a better place with this information.

Should this information be available? I’m reminded of the UCEA panel presentation by Dr. Scott McLeod…. In the conversation, it was obvious that while transparency is great, shouldn’t we be asking whether this information SHOULD be made available? After all, what is helpful to one group in the United States or the United Kingdom can also be helpful to someone wearing a turban that had a terroristic agenda.

Of course, you don’t have to wear a turban to hold and act on a radical point of view, or attempt to legislate your exclusionary beliefs. So, SHOULD Tim be sharing this information on his web site?

Cain & Abel is a password recovery tool for Microsoft Operating Systems. It allows easy recovery of various kind of passwords by sniffing the network, cracking encrypted passwords using Dictionary, Brute-Force and Cryptanalysis attacks, recording VoIP conversations, decoding scrambled passwords, recovering wireless network keys, revealing password boxes, uncovering cached passwords and analyzing routing protocols. The program does not exploit any software vulnerabilities or bugs that could not be fixed with little effort. It covers some security aspects/weakness present in protocol’s standards, authentication methods and caching mechanisms; its main purpose is the simplified recovery of passwords and credentials from various sources, however it also ships some “non standard” utilities for Microsoft Windows users.

It’s pretty easy per Tim’s tutorial–and, of course, the Cain and Abel software–to recover email, FTP, MySQL, etc. as described below:

If you has set up Cain & Abel as described above, all you need to do is send yourself an e-mail. Once you have sent and received the e-mail, go back to Cain & Abel. Click on the Sniffer tab at the top and then the Passwords tab at the bottom. On the left hand side, you will see a listing of different types of passwords that can be retrieved from the network. Your e-mail is likely POP3 so click on that POP3 option.

It is also interesting to see this comment… It [Cain and Abel] can do a lot more such as recovering Access database passwords and revealing what is under the ******** you see in password fields.


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Autistic Carly

21 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, OIT, OnlineLearning

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The following is in response to a few questions. Without providing the questions, here’s my response:

As this article on online learning accommodations points out, “new delivery methods for education create new challenges to our assigned role in assuring access for students with disabilities” (DAIS Online Toolkit). Being responsive and supportive of students with special needs is required by law. This is shared in the information cited below:

No person shall, by any reason of his or her disability be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination in any services, programs, or activities of an entity covered by the law…Under Section 504, children with disabilities must be educated with their nondisabled peers “to the maximum extent appropriate,” and “removal . . . from the regular educational environment occurs only when the nature or severity of the disability is such that education in regular classes with the use of supplementary aids and services cannot be achieved satisfactorily.” (Read Source).

This is important because virtual learning opportunities are now one of the benefits to students. But how can virtual learning be an option for students who have special needs or learning disabilities? One possibility is that students with temporary disabilities can have their needs met (consider Brian Crosby’s class interaction with Celeste, a homebound student). One of the key points that is often missed when discussing the needs of special needs students is the social aspect of learning. These social aspects have to be explicitly taught. As a result of communication with students, “positive group formation” and learning can occur (Read source). It is also important to accommodate for student learners with disabilities. To ensure participation for the student learner, it is important to provide an accommodation or supplementary aid/service necessary. Learning disabilities may be defined as a disorder in one or more basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written. This disability may manifest itself as an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or to do mathematical cal­culations (Source).


The left-thumb blogger is afforded the opportunity to publish to a global audience. This reminds me of autistic Carly, a student who, when given a computer, was able to express herself in ways NEVER imagined autistic students could communicate.

Strategies afforded by new web technologies allow students that have learning disability to side-step their “different ability” and learn via various media (e.g. podcasts, videos), as well as be engaged in creating their own content using a variety of tools (e.g. VoiceThread.com, ShowBeyond.com). For students that second language learners, or English Language Learners, we can see that tools like ShowBeyond.com are helpful; consider this example to build vocabulary in target language. Additionally, other accommodations might include the following as mentioned in the previous source:

  • giving a student extra time on an exam
  • providing hard copy or online model assignments
  • coordinating phone numbers or e-mail addresses for classmates who will share class notes
  • providing training in assistive technology
  • making class notes available on the Web
  • planning clearly-designed Web formats
  • planning both auditory and visual learning and testing options

(Click on the link for clearly-designed Web Formats…very helpful!).

To be responsive to a learner’s needs, the facilitator needs to take advantage of the entire toolkit of multimedia tools available, providing multiple learning opportunities that bypass a disability that might be focused on listening, thinking, speaking, reading, writing, spelling or involve mathematical calculations. By embedding rich choices for content review and creation, this becomes an opportunity for students to learn with each other in a way that is specific, or differentiated, for them–all by design.


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Become Change – TCEA Area 20 Election Coming Soon!

21 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, SAnews, TCEA, Texas

≈ 1 Comment

Mark your calendars! Starting November 2, 2009 (and ending Nov 13), you’ll be able to vote for one of the 3 candidates for TCEA Area 20. Here’s the announcement from TCEA TechNotes online publication:

On Nov. 2, 2009, voting for area director and executive committee members will begin. All current members of TCEA will be eligible to vote electronically. (A current member is defined as one who has paid the $30.00 dues within the past year or has a lifetime membership in the organization granted by the board of directors.)

Members will receive an email with the link to the voting site. The election will run Nov. 2 at 9:00 a.m. through Nov. 13 at midnight, which provides a short time to vote. So vote early to make sure your voice is heard!

As I shared in a previous blog entry, I am focusing on 5 goals. You could say that these 5 items form my platform for running:

  1. Increase presence in online learning area.
  2. Collaborate to develop strategic plans and policies of the Board and be transparent about the success AND failure.
  3. Encourage change relevant to the organization and the stakeholders.
  4. Enhance the Interfaces between organization and community.
  5. Manage financial and physical resources.

I hope you’ll take a moment to read more online. In addition to incumbent Jennifer Faulkner (Alamo Heights ISD), Joel Adkins, CTO for Kerrville ISD, is also running for office. You can read what he has to say online as well. One of the key points Joel makes that is worth our attention as the Membership of TCEA:

…there is a division in the association about the pace of change and implementation of transparency in both TCEA and TEA. It has spurned interesting online discussions, uncomfortable group gatherings, and has developed factions within the larger body of the association. These are symptoms and results of change. It is a the classic battle between tradition and innovation; to which both have relevance on the path to change.

Let’s work together to achieve great change! What’s the difference between change and “great change?” Change that positively transforms, empower our collaborative relationships and communications with one another.

One way to accomplish that is to encourage an Area 20 chairing committee so that the talent running for office doesn’t just keep running off. Remember, it’s not just about winning an election…it’s about making a change in our daily habits and work.


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MyNotes – Collaborative, Connected, and Experiential Learning: Reflections of an Online Learner

21 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, MyNotes, OIT, OnlineLearning

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  • Collaborative, Connected, and Experiential Learning: Reflections of an Online Learner
    • Collaborative, Connected, and Experiential Learning:
      Reflections of an Online Learner

      by D. Bruce Curry
    • One teaching/learning model, which can ameliorate this sense of isolation, is collaborative learning. Collaborative learning involves students in social interaction, as groups work together to solve problems. Students in distance education programs, though separated spatially, can gain a sense of togetherness as they share and clarify ideas, actively contribute to a team, and cooperatively solve problems (Cecez-Kecmanovic & Webb, 2000).
    • hese advances coincide with a general shift in educational theory to a collaborative constructivist conception of learning, which recognizes the learner’s need to share control and assume responsibility for constructing meaning in the context of a peer group (Anderson & Garrison, 1998).
    • Collaborative learning is an outgrowth of cooperative learning, in that students must develop cooperative learning skills in order to use them in self-directed, high-performing teams. These teams conduct free inquiry and members jointly solve problems. Success in cooperative learning is grounded in the skills students develop within the context of the structure provided by the instructor. In distance learning, students must possess or develop the technical skills necessary for online communication, as well as acquire and practice social behaviors necessary for collaboration (Kemery, 2000).
    • Instructors should provide guidance for students on how to work effectively in collaborative teams. The social aspects of successful teams should be explicitly taught and not assumed.
    • desirable qualities are an ability to clarify and commit to goals, an interest in other team members beyond the task at hand, a desire to confront conflict positively, an understanding of others’ perspectives, a commitment to make decisions inclusively, the valuing of individual differences, a willingness to freely contribute ideas and encourage team members, an open and honest evaluation of team performance, and a readiness to celebrate accomplishments
    • The essence of project-based, online collaborative learning is communication because positive group formation and learning occur through on-going dialogue (Kemery, 2000). Asynchronous communications can be utilized for much of the collaborative effort, through email with attachments and private forums. Additionally, synchronous private chat rooms can be used advantageously to facilitate collaborative learning (Lai, 1999). Synchronous communications are critical for establishing team roles, responsibilities, goals, deadlines, and for resolving differences of opinion. Team chats are also important for building relationships, encouraging one another, maintaining momentum, and celebrating accomplishments.
    • Clearly stated project requirements give team members a common starting point and provide a structure upon which to build. They also assist students with the planning of collaborative work responsibilities.
    • Assignment 1: Analysis and Design
      Part 1: Product Review (individual submission)
      Part 2: Instructional Design (team submission)
      Assignment 2: Implementation (team submission)
      Part 1: Written Materials–Summary description of product
      Part 2: Electronic Product
      Assignment 3: Evaluation and Reflections
      Part 1: Evaluation (team submission)
      Alpha test (evaluation forms and summary)
      Beta test (evaluation forms and summary)
      Part 2: Reflection (individual submission)
      A personal communication from the student to the professor concerning the overall learning experience
    • Flexibility in meeting project requirements balances the provision of clearly stated requirements. Flexibility enables students to develop ownership of the project, provides room for creativity, aids in the development of critical thinking skills, and encourages a sense of team unity and individuality.
    • The instructor, by properly subdividing a project, can help teams manage a challenging task, encourage teams to keep on schedule, and provide opportunities for important instructor feedback during the process.
    • Providing guidelines for team formation is critical for team success and cannot be overemphasized. Team formation guidelines help students choose team members intelligently, aid in the formation of team member roles, and help provide a basis for mutual respect among team members.
    • Relationship building allows team members to get to know and appreciate one another’s strengths and weaknesses, facilitates the initial ideation stage of project development, and lays the foundation for a successful collaborative experience.
    • It is very important in online courses for the instructor to maintain a presence with the students.
    • timely emails, which served to help manage the various teams and to ensure that things were proceeding smoothly with the groups. He also provided models for unfamiliar products, such as examples of flowcharts and representative storyboards.
    • Instructors can only do so much to facilitate rewarding collaborative learning experiences. In the final analysis, team members play an important role in the success of the project.
    • The diversity of backgrounds was our team’s strength. It made defining team roles a natural process. Clear and distinct roles aided in team communications and gave members a sense of responsibility and importance. They also assisted in assigning work responsibilities and made project management easier.
    • Project responsibilities proceeded directly and naturally from team member roles. Responsibilities and authority in the given areas of responsibility were well defined. While some overlap existed, individual team members were given more decision-making authority in their various areas of expertise.
    • Team goals should encourage a standard of excellence, be challenging yet reasonable and doable, and be agreed upon by all team members.
    • The major deadlines were set by the professor and were based on experience teaching the class. However, team members also had the opportunity to establish sub-deadlines. These were set well before the actual deadlines to give members time to review and correct work prior to submission. Additionally, major portions of work were subdivided in order to meet schedules. In collaborative efforts, the project manager, by virtue of his role and responsibility, should have more authority in setting deadlines. However, team members must also be convinced that the work can be done in the allotted time. Once set, team members should hold each other accountable for meeting deadlines with encouragement and weekly meetings.
    • In order for collaboration to work, team members must be respectful and considerate of one another, must understand that everyone’s opinions and thoughts are valued, and must be open and honest with communication (frankness is desirable for group members as time is critical).
    • Conflicts concerning the project were resolved by listening to all arguments, debating, and coming to a decision. Decisions were based on ideas and not on personalities. Team members were concerned with the quality of the project and different perspectives were considered important for developing good solutions to problems.
    • Web site
    • In addition to the weekly online meetings, we used email with attachments to follow up discussions and to send subject matter content for inclusion into the
    • Online collaborative project-based courses can be extremely rewarding experiences if certain elements are present. A thoughtful instructor, capable of balancing guidance with freedom is one critical factor. Another is a team with the skills, both technical and social, to truly collaborate. When those two factors and all they entail come together in a learning environment, collaborative projects can result in outcomes far exceeding the expectations of the professor.

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MyNotes – Best Practices in e-Assessment

21 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, MyNotes, OIT, OnlineLearning, Research

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My poorly formatted notes of Best Practices in e-Assessment by Nicole A. Buzzetto-More and Ayodele Julius Alade, University of Maryland Eastern Shore, Princess Anne, MD, USA. Read the complete article online.

o assessment is an ongoing process that involves plan-
ning, discussion, consensus building, reflection, measuring, analyzing, and improving based on
the data and artifacts gathered about a learning objective.
o Assessment encompasses a range of
activities including testing, performances, project ratings, and observations (Orlich, Harder, Callahan & Gibson, 2004)
o The use of information technologies and e-learning strategies can provide an efficient and effective means of assessing teaching and learning effectiveness by supporting traditional, authentic, and alternative assessment protocols (Bennett, 2002)
o technology offers new measures for assessing learning that will yield rich sources of data
and expand the ways in which educators understand both learning mastery, and teaching effec-
tiveness.
o
The use of information technologies and e-learning to augment the assessment process
may include: pre and post testing, diagnostic analysis, student tracking, rubric use, the support
and delivery of authentic assessment through project based learning, artifact collection, and data
aggregation and analysis
o
assessment is an integral piece to assuring that an educational insti-
tution achieves its learning goals, as well as a crucial means of providing the essential evidence
necessary for seeking and maintaining accreditation. Hersh (2004) advocated the position that
assessment of student learning should be considered an integral part of the teaching and learning
processes as well as part of the feedback loop that serves to enhance institutional effectiveness
o
Good assessment serves multiple objectives (Swearington, n.d.) and benefits a number of stake-
holders (Love & Cooper, 2004). According to Dietal, Herman, and Knuth (1991) assessment pro-
vides an accurate measure of student performance to enable teachers, administrators, and other
key decision makers to make effective decisions.
o
Kellough and Kellough (1999) iden-
tified seven purposes of assessment:
1. Improve student learning;
2. Identify students’ strengths and weaknesses;
3. Review, assess, and improve the effectiveness of different teaching strategies;
4. Review, assess, and improve the effectiveness of curricular programs;
5. Improve teaching effectiveness;
6. Provide useful administrative data that will expedite decision making; and
7. To communicate with stakeholders
o
Petkov and Petkova (2006) recommend course-embedded assessment as having the advantage of
ease of implementation, low cost, timeliness, and student acceptance and note that the type of
performance appraisal supported by rubrics is particularly effective when assessing problem solv-
ing, communication and team working skills. They explain that rubrics should not be considered
checklists but rather criteria and rating scales for evaluation of a product or performance. Accord-
ing to Aurbach (n.d.), rubrics articulate the standards by which a product, performance, or out-
come demonstration will be evaluated. They help to standardize assessment, provide useful data,
and articulate goals and objectives to learners. Rubrics are also particularly useful in assessing
complex and subjective skills (Dodge & Pickette, 2001)
o
rubrics in introductory IS courses found that the
use of rubrics helped to make assessment more uniform, better communicate expectations and
performance to students, measure student progress over time, and help to lay the foundation for a
long-terms assessment program that combines projects and portfolios
o
Measuring students’ knowledge, strengths, and weaknesses prior to instruction is done through
diagnostic testing (Swearington, n.d.). Diagnostic assessment allows educators to remedy defi-
ciencies as well as make curricular adjustments
o
Portfolios can be used to assess learning-outcome achievement as well as to diagnose curriculum
deficiencies that require improvement
o
a portfolio should re-
quire students to collect, assemble, and reflect on samples that represent the culmination of their
learning. Cooper (1999) identified six considerations of the portfolio building process: identifica-
o
tion of skill areas, design of measurable outcomes, identification of learning strategies, identifica-
tion of performance indicators, collection of evidence, and assessment
o
Wiggins (1990) suggests that work being assessed should be authentic or based on the real world.
Pellegrino, Chudonsky, and Glaser (2001) suggest that formative assessments focus less on
student responses and more on performance. As a result, many institutions are anchoring their
assessment activities into meaningful scenarios so that students are being assessed on their
abilities to apply learning into realistic situations
o
Value-added assessment demonstrates the progress of student learning throughout a program
(Martell & Calderon, 2005). It requires academics to ask “What do our students know, and how
can we demonstrate that knowledge has been gained?” Value-added assessment commonly in-
volves pre- and post-testing as well as student tracking.
o
the literature suggests that good as-
sessment programs have variety (Swearington, n.d.). Merrimack College, for example, uses diag-
nostic testing, student portfolios, alumni surveys, course evaluations, rubrics, and employer sur-
veys as part of their assessment model (Popper, 2005)
o
Curricular alignment occurs when a program organizes their teaching and learning activities to
reflect desired student outcomes (Martell & Calderon, 2005). According to Baratz-Snowden
(1993), curriculum alignment holds a school accountable for demonstrating when and where stu-
dents have the opportunity to learn information and acquire skills. Engaging in curriculum align-
ment encourages programs to link outcomes to instruction as well as reflect upon the sequence in
which competencies are built.
o
curriculum alignment is particularly
important to K-12 schools faced with high-stakes standardized tests. His study, conducted in the
Massachusetts high school where he serves as principal, showed tangible improvement in stan-
dardized test scores as a result of curriculum alignment
o
effective data management is
crucial to the assessment loop (Dhir,
2005), where the data collected
needs to be made available to fac-
ulty and administrators in a timely
manner so that fact-based decisions
can be made.
o
technology is central to learning and, as a result, is going to prove
to be central to the assessment process. Bennett explains that technology will not only facilitate
testing but also support authentic assessment. He refers to e-learning as part of the equipment of
21st Century scholarship and cites the success of online universities and virtual high schools in the
United States
o
Numerous studies have linked e-learning to critical thinking; for example, a study of 300 recent
MBA graduates conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater found that online learning
encourages high level reflective thinking (Drago, 2004)
o
e-assessment should en-
courage the rethinking of curriculum, e-learning, and technology and explain that e-assessment is
flexible and supports the assessment of higher order thinking, social skills, and group work
through such means as digital portfolios
o
Vendlinski and Stevens (2002) illustrate that technology provides new means to assess learning
that will yield rich sources of data. E-assessment may include pre and post testing, diagnostic
analysis, student tracking, rubric use/analysis, the support and delivery of authentic assessment
through project based learning (e.g. WebQuests, simulations, eportfolios), artifact collection, and
data aggregation and analysis.
o
Rubrics can be translated to a digital format where they may be made available through an intra-
net or over the internet. Used for scoring, these scores provide meaningful assessment informa-
tion. When connected to a database, they provide educators with data that can be aggregated
(Buzzetto-More, 2006). There are a number of websites that assist teachers in the development of
rubrics. Two useful rubric builders can be found at http://rubistar.4teachers.org and
http://landmark-project.com
o
Frequently known as project based learning, it is a form of in-
struction where students are immersed in challenging learning situations that are anchored in real
world simulations (Page, 2006). According to Page, project based learning can support critical
thinking, multilayered decision making, goal setting, problem solving, and collaboration. As a
result, many institutions are anchoring their assessment activities into meaningful scenarios so
that students are being assessed on their abilities to apply learning into realistic situations
o
Computer simulations are a form of project based learning that require learners to discover and
apply learned skills interactive changing environments that mimic real-world situations (Berge
2002)
o
educators are increasingly finding the value of using rubrics to fully evaluate simulation
participation because the score or end result is not always indicative of the students thought proc-
essing and participation
o
online discourse fosters critical
thinking and reflection, and Wu and Hiltz (2004) explained that asynchronous communications
improved students’ perception of learning. A study conducted in the United Arab Emirates indi-
cated that students who are reluctant to participate in classroom discussions are more vocal in
electronic discussions and that discussions increase understanding of course content (Bhatti,
Tubaisahat, & El-Quawasmeh, 2005). Successful online discussions can allow students to demon-
strate not just content mastery but the ability to incorporate content into higher level thinking; as a
result, transcripts from electronic discussions have shown themselves to be valuable assessment
artifacts (Buzzetto-More, 2006)
o
Portfolios are an effective form of alternative assessment that encourages students and
educators to examine skills that may not be otherwise accessed using traditional means such as
higher order thinking, communications, and collaborative abilities (Buzzetto-More, 2006; Wright,
2004). According to the ePortConsortium (2003) the benefits of electronic portfolios in education
are that they help students develop organizational skills; recognize skills, abilities, and shortcom-
ings; showcase talents; assess academic progress; demonstrate how skills have developed over
time; make career decisions; demonstrate that one has met program or certification requirements;
and promote themselves professionally
o
A portfolio should require students to collect, assemble, and reflect on samples that represent the
culmination of their learning (Chun, 2002) providing students with a diversity of opportunities to
skills and abilities (Martell & Calderon, 2005)
o
Online portfolios
o
are dynamic and multimedia
driven; accessible by a large audience; contain meta-documentation; easy to store; and may serve
to promote a student academically or professionally
o
the skills
required in the creation of electronic portfolios helps students learn, understand, and implement
the information literacy process.
o
Information literacy is the ability to collect, evaluate, assemble, reflect upon, and use information
in order to learn and inform problem-solving and decision making (Bruce, 2003). It is a skill cru-
cial to lifelong learning that is dependent on the ability to engage in critical and reflective think
o
Electronic portfolios are quickly becoming the primary means in academia for
students to demonstrate and reflect on learning in a way that helps students build and apply in-
formation literacy skills (Lorenzo & Ittelson, 2005a
o
Other technologies that are gaining in popularity in e-assessment include pen top computing
(which allows teachers to review, comment, add to, and access handwritten student notes and
work), integrated student response keypads (which allow for real time whole class questioning
and data collection and analysis), pod casting (recording and distributing small audio and video
files to students via their handheld devices), and digital video/audio lecture capturing synched
with tablet pc presentations and activities (providing an archived record of teaching effectiveness
for assessment demonstration).
o
assessment systems must take into ac-
count issues of interface, accessibility, security, usability, the information to be collected, hard-
ware and software technology, and information storage and processing
o
The
electronic portfolios created by students include: lesson plans, WebQuests, student teaching vid-
eos, images, reflective journal entries, papers, transcripts, evaluations completed by cooperating
teachers, observations made by their program advisor, student projects, rubrics, study aides,
PowerPoint Presentations, websites, curriculum maps, goals and objectives, seating charts, behav-
ior expectation sheets, assessment materials, progress reports, and a variety of other artifacts that
demonstrate a students mastery of the principles established by the Interstate New Teacher As-
sessment and Support Consortium which have been adopted by the University. Portfolios are pre-
sented by the students and assessed using a simple rubric by a team of assessors. The portfolio is
accessible to students for a period of seven years following their graduation from the program and
has shown itself to be a useful resource for students applying for employment as it allows them to
communicate a variety of skills and abilities in a dynamic format
o
The goal is to have a detailed data-management system in place that will
enable faculty across the department, university administrators, and accrediting agencies to re-
view data and artifacts on a continuous basis. The use of a multi-queriable assessment database
allows the department to run an extensive variety of correlations relevant to the overall quality of
teaching and learning, as well as to automate administrative functions. The data-management sys-
tem under consideration will include: placement-test results, grades, advisement information, par-
ticipation in university activities, diagnostic scores, rubric ratings, videos, attendance information,
use of remediation services, samples of student work, and other useful artifacts. For security rea-
sons, varying levels of accessibility will be determined based on the needs of the users, and in
many instances student identifiers will be removed

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MyNotes – Section 504, ADA and Education Reform

21 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, MyNotes, OIT, OnlineLearning

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The following are my notes on the Section 504, ADA, and Education Reform Fact Sheet provided by Parents Engaged in Education Reform (PEER), a project of the Federation for Children with Special Needs (www.fcsn.org/peer).

  • Public schools, school systems, and education reform initiatives must comply with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (Section 504) and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) which prohibit discrimination on the basis of disability.
  • Section 504 prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability by recipients of federal financial assistance, including Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funds. Title II of the ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability by state and local governmental entities, including public school districts.
  • Both statutes require school districts to provide a free appropriate public education (FAPE) to students with disabilities protected by those laws.
  • no person shall, by any reason of his or her disability be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination in any services, programs, or activities of an entity covered by the law.
  • Section 504 also applies to a student not eligible for special education and related services under Part B, but who has a disability within the meaning of Section 504.
  • Section 504 and the ADA can help ensure that students with disabilities enjoy the benefits of standards-based education reforms and the quality education they aim for. The theory behind standards-based education reform is that educational quality will rise for all students, by first setting high standards, then shaping curriculum, courses, and instruction to meet the standards, and finally holding schools accountable for student achievement.
    • Section 504 and the ADA promote equal access to and participation in programs and services. The regulations implementing these laws require that students with disabilities receive benefits and services comparable to those given their nondisabled peers. These laws make it illegal for schools to discriminate on the basis of disability by—

      • denying a student the opportunity to participate in or benefit from a benefit or service;
      • providing an opportunity to participate or benefit that is unequal to that provided others;
      • providing a benefit or service that is not as effective as that provided to others (does not provide an equal opportunity to obtain the same result, gain the same benefit, or reach the same level of achievement as other students);
      • providing lower quality benefits, services or programs than those provided others; or
      • providing different or separate benefits or services, unless they are necessary for benefits or services to be as effective as those provided to others.1
  • The Section 504 regulations specifically require that a recipient of federal funds that operates a public elementary or secondary education program must provide a free appropriate public education to each qualified child with a disability residing in the recipient’s jurisdiction in accordance with the Section 504 requirements regarding least restrictive setting, evaluation and placement, and procedural safeguards.
  • It is illegal under the Section 504 and ADA regulations for school systems to use “criteria and methods of administration” that, intentionally or not, result in discrimination. “Criteria” are written or formal policies, while “methods of administration”3 are the school system’s actual practices and procedures.
    • includes those that:

      • have the effect of discriminating against students with disabilities, or
      • have the effect of defeating or impairing accomplishment of the education program objective (or school reform initiative) with regard to students with disabilities.
  • The ban
  • school systems must make accommodations and modifications to address the needs of students with disabilities.
  • Under Section 504, children with disabilities must be educated with their nondisabled peers “to the maximum extent appropriate,” and “removal . . . from the regular educational environment occurs only when the nature or severity of the disability is such that education in regular classes with the use of supplementary aids and services cannot be achieved satisfactorily.”4 The ADA regulations similarly provide that a public entity, such as a school system, must provide programs and services “in the most integrated setting appropriate to the needs”5 of individuals with disabilities.
    The requirements of Section 504 apply in determining whether school districts have met their obligation to students with disabilities under Title II of the ADA. Schools have the burden of demonstrating that any removal from regular education is appropriate.
  • Standards-based education reform aims to attain high quality educational outcomes by identifying desired learning outcomes for students, shaping curricula and instruction accordingly, and holding schools accountable for the results.
  • If a state or school system adopts standards for general education, then students with disabilities have the right to an education based on these same standards. Failure to apply standards to students with disabilities is a failure to provide “comparable benefits and services.”
  • Students with disabilities, like all other students, must be provided with courses and instruction that teach the curriculum. Otherwise, they will be denied comparable benefits and services in violation of Section 504 and the ADA.
  • For some students, the method of teaching some or all of the curriculum may need to be modified, perhaps an accommodation, or as a supplementary aid or service necessary for maximum feasible participation in regular education. For a small number of students who have significant disabilities, it may be necessary to modify, adapt, or expand the curriculum or instruction to provide access to the standards. These decisions must be made on an individual basis, and based upon valid and competent individualized educational evaluations.
  • School systems must also identify and examine any policies or practices (“criteria or methods of administration”) that may have the effect of limiting students’ access to the courses and instruction necessary to learn the curriculum and meet the standards. Any number of policies and practices might have this effect. Examples include lack of coordination (in terms of both scheduling and content) between pull-out programs such as resource rooms and the mainstream academic curriculum; providing a diluted curriculum in separate programs and classes for students with disabilities; and failing to integrate special education supports and related services into regular education classes.
  • Assessment is the way standards-based education holds schools accountable for student learning and achievement.
  • When they are excluded from assessment, schools are not held accountable for the quality of education students with disabilities receive. These students are denied the benefit of this critical aspect of standards-based education reform, in violation of the requirement to provide comparable benefits and services under Section 504 and the ADA.
  • laws also require schools to provide any accommodations and modifications students need to participate in assessments. Many students will not require any changes in the way that the assessment is given. Others will need accommodations, such as extra time or provision of materials in a different format (e.g., Braille, large print, a reader), in order to participate. A relatively small percentage of students may require an alternate assessment to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in a nondiscriminatory manner.

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MyNotes – The Privacy of Student Information

21 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in MyNotes, OIT, OnlineLearning

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The following are my notes from The Privacy of Student Information: A Resource for Schools document from the National Forum on Education Statistics.

  1. As an employee of a school or other education institution, you may sometimes access individual student records while performing your official duties. Under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), you are legally and ethically obliged to safeguard the confidentiality of any information they contain.
  2. The school district is responsible for ensuring that all parents and eligible students are afforded all the rights provided them by FERPA.
  3. FERPA is a federal law that protects privacy interests of parents and students in student education records.
  4. This guide defines terms such as “education records” and “directory information”; and offers guidance for developing appropriate privacy policies and information disclosure procedures related to military recruiting, parental rights and annual notification, videotaping, online information, media releases, surveillance cameras, and confidentiality concerns related specifically to health-related information.
  5. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is a federal law that protects the privacy interests of students. It affords parents the right to access and amend their children’s education records, and gives them some control over the disclosure of the information in these records. FERPA generally prevents an education agency or institution from sharing student records, or personally identifiable information in these records, without the written consent of a parent. A “parent” is defined as a natural or adoptive parent, a legal guardian, or an individual acting as a parent in the absence of the parent or guardian. When students reach the age of 18, or attend a postsecondary institution at any age, they are considered “eligible students” and all of the rights afforded by FERPA transfer from the parents to the students. (34 CFR § 99.3)
  6. FERPA does allow the disclosure of student data without parental consent under certain, specified conditions. For example, schools may reveal information from student records to school officials with a legitimate educational interest in the information.
  7. employees of a school and education institution…are legally and ethically obliged to safeguard their confidentiality.
  8. The term “education records” is defined as all records, files, documents and other materials containing information directly related to a student; and are maintained by the education agency or institution or by a person acting for such agency or institution (34 CFR § 99.3). This includes all records regardless of medium, including, but not limited to, handwriting, videotape or audiotape, electronic or computer files, film, print, microfilm, and microfiche.
  9. For PreK–12 students, health records maintained by an education agency or institution subject to FERPA, including immunization records and school nurse records, generally would be also considered “education records” and subject to FERPA because they are:
    directly related to the student;
    maintained by an education agency or institution, or a party acting for the agency or institution; and
    not excluded from the definition of education records as treatment or sole-possession records, or on some other basis. (See Health Records: FERPA and HIPAA.)
  10. Personal notes made by teachers or other staff, on the other hand, are not considered education records if they are:
    kept in the sole possession of the maker;
    not accessible or revealed to any other person except a temporary substitute, and
    used only as a memory aid.
    Records created and maintained by a law enforcement unit for law enforcement purposes are also excluded.
  11. If a school system discloses directory information, it must give “public notice” of this policy and explain what is included in such information. FERPA does not define “public notice,” and the means of notification is left up to the school.
  12. Directory information…may include the student’s name, address, telephone number, date and place of birth, honors and awards, and dates of attendance.
  13. While school systems designate varying types of information as directory information, most include a student’s name, family members’ names, home address, and school activities. The height and weight of athletes may also be included.
    School systems should give careful consideration to designating data as “directory information” because once this designation is given; school officials may distribute the information to anyone who requests it—in or outside the school.
  14. School systems that disclose directory information must give “public notice” of this policy and explain what is included in such information; the notice must also indicate that parents may refuse to allow the school to designate any, or all, of their child’s record as directory information. Several ways public notice can be given include: a notice in the registration package sent home to parents, a notice in the local newspaper, a notice in the school handbook distributed each year, or a posting on the school system’s website.
  15. FERPA requires the public notice to specify how much time parents have to tell the school or school system what, if any directory information they do not wish released.
  16. FERPA regulations require that local education agencies give annual notification to parents and eligible students of their rights under FERPA (34 CFR § 99.7).
  17. parents understand that they have the right to:
    inspect and review their child’s record;
    seek to amend the record if they believe it to be inaccurate;
    consent (or not) to disclosures of personally identifiable information; and
    file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education concerning the district’s failures to comply with FERPA.
  18. If the education record includes information about other students, that information must be removed prior to disclosure so that parents do not have access to any other child’s records. (34 CFR § 99.12)
  19. When parents (or eligible students) request to review their records, the education institution must respond within 45 days, even if these records are kept by an outside party acting for the school. During these 45 days, the education institution cannot destroy any of the requested records.
  20. FERPA allows disclosure, without consent, to the following parties or under the following conditions:
    *School officials with a “legitimate educational interest” may access student records under FERPA.
    *Schools that submit a records request or in which a student has enrolled are eligible to receive information from that student’s education records.
    *Audit/evaluation purposes…the exception refers to federal, state, and local education agencies that must collect data or student information to audit, evaluate, or enforce educational programs.
    *Information required to determine student eligibility for financial aid, the amount of aid to award, and the conditions under which aid is to be granted may be disclosed under this category; access to information needed to enforce those terms and conditions is also allowed.
    *The purpose of the study conducted for, or on behalf of, a school has to be to: develop, validate, or administer predictive tests; administer student aid programs; or improve instruction. Even if these conditions are met, the school may only disclose information if: the study methodology does not permit the personal identification of parents and students by anyone other than the researchers and their representatives; the information is not used for any purpose other than to complete the study; and the information is destroyed when it is no longer needed for the stated purposes of the study.
    *Disclosure of personal information is permitted to an accrediting organization if it is needed to carry out the accreditation.
    *Schools must release information requested by a judicial order or legal subpoena. However, the school must make a reasonable effort to notify the parent (or eligible student) in advance of compliance, unless the court or other issuing agency has ordered that the contents of the subpoena not be disclosed, or that the protected education records not be included.
    *Disclosure to appropriate officials is valid if the information contained in the education record is necessary to protect the health or safety of the student or other individuals.
    *If state law permits, schools may release information to state and local juvenile justice authorities after receiving written certification that the information will not be disclosed to any other agency, organization, or third party without the parent’s permission, except as allowed in state law.
  21. While FERPA does not require schools to transfer education records to third parties, it does permits their transfer to another school if a student seeks or intends to enroll in that school; as part of the education records, disciplinary records would therefore be included in the transfer.
  22. According to the preamble to the December 2000 final rules, “the educational institution or agency that employs a school nurse is subject to our (HIPAA) regulation if the school nurse or the school engages in a HIPAA transaction.” HIPAA transactions are defined in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) as “the transmission of information between two parties to carry out financial or administrative activities related to health care,” including submitting claims. However, consent must still be secured under FERPA before the records are disclosed.
  23. Nothing in FERPA prohibits a school from disclosing information in aggregate, or in another form that is not personally identifiable. Personally identifiable information includes:
    the student’s name;
    the name of the student’s parent or other family member;
    the address of the student or student’s family;
    a personal identifier, such as the student’s social security number or student number;
    a list of personal characteristics that would make the student’s identity easily traceable; or
    other information that would make the student’s identity easily traceable.
  24. In circumstances that may lead to the identification of an individual, the disclosing education agency or institution must ensure that student-level information is not personally identifiable by removing the student’s name and ID number, as well as any “personal characteristics” and “other information that would make the student’s identity easily traceable.”
  25. The required consent form should specify:
    the records that may be disclosed;
    the purpose of the disclosure; and
    the identify of the party or class of parties to whom the disclosure may be made.
  26. Upon request, and after notifying parents, schools must release to military recruiters the name, address, and telephone numbers of high school juniors and seniors.
  27. Today’s information portability makes performing many school-related tasks more convenient; however, it also increases the risk of unauthorized access to protected information. As school administrators, teachers, and support staff find new ways to store and access student records, they must still ensure the information’s confidentiality and privacy.
  28. For example, if an administrator misplaces a handheld computer, any personally identifiable information it contains becomes potentially available to anyone who finds the device. Teachers carrying grade files home on a flash drive or storing other personally identifiable student information on home computers, create the risk of unauthorized access to protected education records. Likewise, education records transferred through electronic mail could potentially be intercepted by unauthorized individuals. Since such situations occur daily in schools across the country, local education agencies must take precautions to guard against the unintentional release or unauthorized disclosure of education records.
  29. School systems should have a surveillance camera policy outlining the rights and responsibilities of students, teachers, administrators, and other school staff. As a best practice, the policy should include the following:
    a clear statement of appropriate reasons for using surveillance cameras;
    the role and responsibilities of individuals with access to the cameras;
    who will have access to any footage;
    how long will any footage be kept and how will it be destroyed; and
    a consent provision.
  30. As soon as school officials use surveillance camera videos for discipline purposes, however, the tapes become education records and are subject to FERPA requirements.
  31. When created and kept by the school or education agency, videotapes or photographs directly related to a specific student are considered part of that student’s education records and, therefore, subject to FERPA. For instance, if the tape captured an altercation, it would be included in the involved students’ education record, and the school has to obtain consent before publishing or disclosing its contents to unauthorized individuals. However, authorization would be needed only for the students actually involved in the altercation; other students in the video would be considered “set dressing” (not relevant to the incident) and not covered.
  32. Posting information is considered “disclosure” and must, therefore, comply with FERPA guidelines. Even without FERPA, school officials should consider safety concerns and exercise caution when displaying information (such as identifiable pictures) about students on the Internet, even if the information is designated as directory information. Including parents in any decisions about how much student information is appropriate might be a good practice, especially for younger students.

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Writing Lesson

21 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

I wrote this a few years ago, and adapted it again recently in October, 2009. Since I don’t want to lose it, I’m posting it here!

How To Write a “Talking to Animals” Poem

Author/Facilitator: Miguel Guhlin
Copyright: CC-NC-SA-Attribution
Creation Date: 10/14/2009; Last Modified: 10/14/2009
Short Web URL for this Page: http://sn.im/mgpoetrylesson

CONTENT AREA: Writing

GRADE LEVEL RANGE: 2-5

UNIT TOPIC: Writing about a real or imaginary trip

CONTENT OBJECTIVE(S):
From TEKS Grade 2

  1. 4A – Use vocabulary to describe ideas, feelings, and experiences
  2. 14B – Write to discover, develop and refine ideas
  3. 18A – Generate ideas for writing by using prewriting techniques such as drawing or listing
  4. 18E – Use technology for writing: word processing, spell checking, printing

RESOURCES/MATERIALS:
1. Computers
2. Internet access
3. GoogleDocs

LESSON PROCEDURE:
Some background info: The idea for this comes from Kenneth Koch’s Rose, Where Did You Get that Red?

Guiding Principle for students composing:
“Imagine you are talking to a mysterious and beautiful creature and you can speak its secret language, and you can ask it anything you want.”
Read more about this approach.

Day 1 – MiniLesson: Pre-Writing

  1. Share the following with students:
    In class, you’ve been working on a story about taking a trip. Today, we’re going to play with words to make a poem. Poems can tell a story using word pictures. Here are a few pictures of animals to get you thinking. We’re going to make a picture map of different animals. How would it feel to be one of these animals? Imagine you are talking to a mysterious and beautiful creature and you can speak its secret language, and you can ask it anything you want.What would it say?

    Example of The Tiger:
    external image 20091014-mw4drh1q355jwxpabhi4peaf7p.png
    Poem to Read – William Blake’s, The Tyger
    Read a student poem inspired by Blake’s poem.

    Slideshow #1:

    For Animal Lovers

    View more presentations from Ren Chang.

    Slideshow #2:

    Nic Animal Photos..

    View more presentations from DINISHA .
  2. Run the slide shows above so they can see some of the animals. As a group, pick one of the images of animals that is shown. This will be the animal that you use for a collaborative writing workshop.
  3. Make a word map using Wordle.net as children describe the animal and then how the animal feels.

    For example, for a picture of a labrador retriever:
    external image Golden_Retriever.jpg

    Here are some of words that might come to mind: strong medium-sized hunter friendly soft furry enthusiastic healthy family energetic exercise retriever Labrador Labrador Labrador Labrador water dog dog Loving marley and me

Which results in a Wordle like this one (note that Labrador appears 4x above to make it the “central” word):
external image 20091014-c8rpjjwx8gbif5r61scg1ps6ku.png

4. Share the slide show with students and ask them to make a word map to describe a picture they choose. You might want to print out black-n-whites of the animal slides and let them do the word map next to the picture. You could also brainstorm words that describe, as well as feeling words, and list those on a whiteboard/blackboard so that students have a list to choose from when describing their animal of choice.
5. At the end of class, collect the graphic organizers students have made for next time.

Lesson 2: Writing the Poem

  1. Ask a student to summarize what the class did before.
  2. Using the word map you created as a class, write a “group poem.” Begin each poem with a question, then spend the rest of the poem telling what your animal said. For example:

    Labrador Retriever, why do you like to swim and hunt?
    So I can run and play in the grass and water all day long.
    I see my friends and sniff their noses
    I let my friends brush my fur
    I listen to the ants as they play on my paws

    Labrador Retriever, how come you frolic so much?
    I have a happy heart and every good lick comes from my spirit, free and strong.

    You can also add animals.

    Of course, you could “wordle” the poem, too! See the example below:
    external image 20091014-1quqq6ynk7hdu4e9cxuwjymn3y.png

  3. Make sure that the poem includes one line from each child in the class. Put that poem where all the children can see it as an example.
  4. Pass out their graphic organizer. Now, you are going to write your own I Wish poem about being an animal. You can’t change animals until after you’ve tried a new one.
  5. At the end of class, ask children to post their poems on the GoogleDocs (then share it as a web page). Some ground rules include:
    –We are going to share our poems with each other.
    –If you want to share a comment about something to the author of the poem, it has to be something nice about what they wrote.

Lesson 3: Publishing the Poems

  1. Use GoogleDocs Presentation to make a slideshow of the poems, having each student add the picture of their animal and the text.
  2. Model how to login to the GoogleDocs Presentation and type in the group poem.
  3. Publish the poem and show kids that it is on the Internet. Be sure to tell them that only other classes at the partner campus will be able to see it.
  4. If lab time is available, have students type their poems into the blog. You will want to log students in–or get them to login–so that they can get started. If not, divide them up into groups of 5. Ask them to vote on the best poem and make a list of why they think it should be published. Publish the 5 poems by typing them in yourself or getting students to type them in.

Lesson 4: Commenting on Other Class’ Poems

  1. Ask students in pairs to read one other poem written by a class member.
  2. Each dyad will make 3 points and include them as a comment to the author of the original poem.

ASSESSMENT:
1. Ask students in another class to assess the poems. They might use a simple rubric.


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

TCEA Educator Award Nominations Now OPEN!

20 Tuesday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, TCEA, Texas

≈ Leave a comment

Consider nominating someone…

There are more than 360,000 professional educators in Texas. Only eight will receive a TCEA educator award this year. Do you know an educator who goes above and beyond the call of duty? Nominate him or her for TCEA’s annual Educator Awards.

Awards are given for the following:

  • Classroom Teacher of the Year
  • Library Media Specialist of the Year
  • Instructional Technology Specialist of the Year
  • Technical Support Person of the Year
  • District or Campus Administrator of the Year
  • Superintendent of the Year
  • Technology Administrator of the Year
  • Lifetime Achievement for the Advancement of Technology in Education

Completed entries must be received on or before Dec. 1, 2009. Information on the nomination process is available here.


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Need for Radical Reboot – Dismissing the ISTE Keynote

17 Saturday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Conferences, Education

≈ 15 Comments

This will sound a bit curmudgeony, but so what? I’m not going to be attending ISTE 2010 since, to be blunt, I feel like attending too many conferences puts you on the “conference circuit.” (it’s also out of state during a tough economy).

Once you’re on that train, you’re focused on discussions that capture people’s attention, engage folks, but DON’T MAKE A DARN DIFFERENCE when people get back to their schools and classrooms. Yes, I’m saying, all this talk about leadership and research is too doggone confusing for the majority of K-12 teachers. . .yes, yes, I know YOU are different. I’m talking about trying to make a steak while juggling eggs, washing dishes, taking care of two toddlers at the same time that you just throw up your hands and let the dishes pile up until later, put the eggs down, and focus on cooking and ensuring your toddlers don’t over-run you. There’s only so much multi-tasking possible, isn’t there?!?

It’s the equivalent of presenting a fantastic Web 2.0 tool and then expecting teachers to accomplish the following:

  1. Learn how to use the tool well enough that it becomes part of their practice. Why should people learn 100+ Web 2.0 tools when they don’t have but a fraction of time to even use 1 tool? Something’s wrong with this.
  2. Use the tool within the context of their school. Context…it’s an important thing to be aware of, yet we continue to deploy solutions that are designed–and we say they are–to TRANSFORM that context, destroy the culture that many people are happy with. No one, unless they are a deviant, wants to be a change agent. Yes, it’s a sorry fact, but while it’s nice to talk change everywhere else, some just want to go home and relax without the expectation of change…it’s the “I’ll move your cheese, but don’t you dare think you can move MY cheese” phenomenon.
  3. Even if you have leadership support to accomplish change and turn around a school, school change only lasts as long as the people are there, usually 3-4 years. (where’s that research study when I need to cite it). And, once leaders “turn things around” they do the smart thing and move onto some place else so that they don’t have to live with those consequences…living change can be hard work, too…harder than making change, if you know what I mean.
  4. Web 2.0 tools involve putting some parents’ kids cheek-to-jowl (virtually) with kids from someplace else. Unless you change the culture of the school, what liability and accountability issues are you going to have to deal with?

I just finished reading Vicki Davis’ proposal and Scott McLeod’s. I’ll be blunt, they’re both chock-full of high-falutin’ ideas. But the truth is, I’m tired of hitching my carriage behind some writer’s idea of what could be in business but is designed for education since they’re the chosen keynoter. While research may say something, the fact is, research has been speaking up for years in school change and reform…and you know what? People aren’t listening.

So, what’s my idea for an ISTE Keynote? Well, I’m not going, but I’d like to put all these book authors turned speakers, megabloggers on ice and get back to the hard tacks. Find me an inner-city, public school teacher in the trenches who’s using technology with her students for the last 7 years, who has found measured ways to introduce technology as part of her core content instruction, and that would be someone to listen to.

That would be someone inspiring, life-altering, etc. Until then, maybe a silent keynote would be best. An hour of silence to appreciate that our very system of schools is all goofed and radical reboot is the first step.

Update 12:07 PM: And, if you must vote for something, try Brian Crosby’s suggestion.

All that aside, I applaud ISTE for putting this opportunity out there for discussion! Brilliant!


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

TxDLA Extends Proposal Deadline to October 30

16 Friday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, OnlineLearning, Texas

≈ Leave a comment

Are you still orbiting with great ideas?
It’s not too late to launch another proposal…

The TxDLA CFP has been
extended to October 30th!

TxDLA 2010 - The Houston Conference

The countdown to the TxDLA 2010 Houston Conference has begun and we are on a mission to find the best presenters the universe has to offer. Are you the shining star that we have been wishing for? Do you have something to share that’s simply out of this world? If so, the Texas Distance Learning Association would like to make contact with you. Send us your submission for a 45-minute breakout session, a 105-minute hands-on workshop or an exhibitor showcase. Choose from 11 specialized tracks that provide offerings for administrators, business/industry professionals, corporate trainers, faculty, government agency employees, K-12 educators, military employees, support staff and vocational/technical educators. The sky’s the limit when it comes to exploration, so click the link below to lift off.

Click here to beam up a proposal

While you’re getting ready to launch your own proposal, think of someone else who would make an awesome TxDLA 2010 presenter. Click the link at the bottom of this page to invite additional speakers, trainers and teachers to participate. The person who submits the most successful recommendations will win TWO Houston City Pass books. Each book allows access to several main attractions in Houston, including: Space Center Houston, Downtown Aquarium, Houston Museum of Natural Science, Houston Zoo, MOFA, and George Ranch Historical Park. The books do not have an expiration date and can be used anytime. Any TxDLA member is eligible to participate in the contest whether they submit a proposal or not.

Refer Speakers & Win Prizes!
Click Here to Make a Referral


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TEC-SIG Fall 2009 – Moodle UnConference and MoodleMoot 2010

16 Friday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Conferences, Moodle, MoodleConversations, TCEA, TECSIG, Texas

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Mike Gras (White Oak ISD) and Scott Floyd (White Oak ISD) took the time to organize a Moodle Unconference after-hours, at the end of the day on Thursday, October 16, 2009. I believe it was organized as a result of a question Mary Jo Humphries (Roundrock ISD) asked. Regardless of why or whom (please speak up), I was grateful to have the opportunity to share the work my team is engaged in at work, as well as listen to the solutions others are developing.

Consider that for the TxvSN, these stats reflect growing participation:

  • Fall, 2009 -406 enrollments
  • high School enrollments – 247
  • Dual credit enrollments – 159
  • Dual credit pilot program

While students are being thrown into online learning, that also requires a corresponding education/professional learning for their teachers, as well as increased access for “regular” teachers.

What’s helpful about these conversations is that there are no presumed experts…we are simply hard-working Moodlers sharing what we’re learning as we’re doing it, or planning implementation.

Special Thanks to Virgil Kirk (Poteet ISD) for agreeing to host the Moodle Video Tutorials and courses that Texas Moodlers are putting together!

While a podcast will soon be available, here is a list of some of the topics I shared about (see complete list online here):

  • How to get started
  • Courses for download to kickstart your Moodle course development
  • Assessment
  • The necessity of online facilitator training for staff tasked with developing in-house district courses.

One exciting presentation was shared by the person from HEB ISD…that of International Baccalaureate (sp?) Moodle course development. I’ll have to explore this some more.

A list of Moodles in Texas participating in the Unconference session:

  1. http://heblearning.hebisd.edu – Hurst-Euless-Bedford ISD
  2. San Antonio ISD
    http://intouch.saisd.net/plc – Professional Learning Center
    http://intouch.saisd.net/opencampus – K-12 Learners Open Campus
    http://intouch.saisd.net/ourspace – A DRAFT Initiative for Mathematics Tutorials
    http://intouch.saisd.net/itech – Our Support Area for various initiatives
  3. http://moodle.uhcl.edu – University of Houston Clear Lake, a provider of TxVSN approved courses
  4. http://moodle.forneyisd.net/moodle – Forney ISD
  5. http://moodle.roundrockisd.org – RoundRock ISD
  6. http://moodle.goliadisd.org/moodle19 – Goliad ISD
  7. http://woisd.net/moodle – White Oak ISD

Of the MoodleMeet, Mike Gras wrote the following to other technology education coordinators:

I guess this was just another thing that demonstrates the desire of the TECSIG to be responsive to the needs of its members. It was a pleasure to meet you all and to hear of the efforts being made by our members to serve children. How cool it was to be exposed to the high level expertise that is at our fingertips right inside our own organization. It was also a great pleasure to see how many of us were set on our current course by my friend and mentor Ken Task. He is a wonder. I have listed David Williams’ contact information below. He is the fellow I had Skype in. Those of you facing providing service to thousands of students should likely, as discussed, give professional hosting serious consideration.

I made commitments to several of you and likely would have made more if time had allowed (I learned that from Ken as well.) My contact info is below David’s.

Thanks to TECSIG for giving me the opportunity to share and learn.

Scott Floyd also wrote a brief description in response to Mike Gras’ post on the subject:

No doubt, this gathering is the epitome of why we meet as SIGs in TCEA. It is the ultimate un-conference style meeting because it is user driven and completely voluntary. Thank you all for being a part of it and allowing me to join you.

One suggestion I made was that the SOSSIG OS room at TCEA would be a perfect place for us to meet to continue the conversation we began. It seems as though everyone agreed. The SOSSIG officers will provide an agenda before conference that lists the time(s) this meeting will take place. Being that it is a technology setting, we can stream folks in as bandwidth allows. We should not leave any voice out if we can avoid it. The OS room is a playground room to showcase a number of opensource offerings (like Moodle). It does not require SOSSIG membership, but you just might decide to join once you realize the pool of talent it holds. Everyone in the SOSSIG has been very willing to help others move ahead in implementation of opensource tools. Great group.

Also, TCEA is looking to host a Moodle Moot in the future. I believe the Dallas area is the projected location. Once that is settled, I am sure there will be a release announcing it that will circulate this list as well as others. Be sure to go and support the event so that it shows there is a need for this type of event.

You may recall I first suggested a MoodleMoot for 2010 and suggested the idea to TCEA. I’m glad to hear that Lori Gracey–who requested I keep silent about the event until more details are available–has taken the lead in organizing a Texas MoodleMoot 2010. I simply lacked the time with work and professional commitments to organize this event, but I sure can participate in it!

If you’re a Texas Moodler, be sure to join TCEA and get going with this!

Full Disclosure: I am available to share my time and what I’ve learned with new Moodlers. Several districts, ESCs and TCEA have taken me up on my offer, compensating me for my time to share ideas. However, ALL my published articles on Moodle, videos, tutorials are available under Creative Commons Copyright (ShareAlike-NonCommercial-Attribution) for your use. Take advantage of them!

Those are online at http://mguhlin.net/moodle

That said, my participation at yesterday’s MoodleMeet at TEC-SIG was as a school district sharing what works, not as a consultant seeking contracts. I want to be sure to be clear about the separation.

Many thanks to Wikispaces.com for hosting me at no charge!! Adam Frey, keep up the great work.


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

16 Friday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, OnlineLearning

≈ Leave a comment

Check out the Challenger Learning Center e-Missions offered to grades 3-12!

Dear Teachers, Technology Coordinators, & Administrators:

Academic year 2009-2010 is underway (hip, hip, hooray!) and the staff at the Challenger Learning Center has been gearing up for another stellar year. Please check out the current list of e-Missions that we offer for grades 3-12 on our website at www.e-missions.net.

Each mission scenario includes a wide range of lesson plans and materials that have been aligned with state and national standards that are ready for you to deliver in the classroom. On mission day, your students will become engaged in a simulated learning environment; they will use their math skills and apply their science knowledge to solve real problems. Many describe the e-Mission as ‘the premier distance learning experience’. Exposing your students to these problem-based simulations will give them the opportunity to excel in the classroom and help them become life-long learners.

To realize all the benefits of these programs, schedule a free Teacher Training mission with us via video conference today! I would love the opportunity to discuss any of our e-Mission programs with you and to help you “get connected” with Mission Control at the Challenger Learning Center.

If you have not yet scheduled your e-Mission(s) for this year, NOW is the time! You can complete the attached reservation form and return it to me; or you can reserve your dates/times with our on-line reservation system on www.e-missions.net.

We value each of you and your commitment to quality education and our staff at the Challenger Learning Center will continue to provide you unconditional support in this process. As always, we look forward to working with you to help bring these exciting distance learning experiences to your students. Please contact me and let us help you make school year 2009-2010 the best it can be!

kathleen_signature

Kathleen Frank

Assistant Director

e-Missions Programs

Challenger Learning Center

Wheeling Jesuit University

316 Washington Ave.

Wheeling, WV 26003

304-243-2495

304-830-1023 (Cell)

www.e-missions.net


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

TECSIG Fall 2009 – David Warlick’s Keynote

16 Friday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, experience, InformationLiteracy, native, OnlineLearning, warlick

≈ 1 Comment

On Thursday, October 15, 2009, members of the TCEA TEC-SIG organization had the opportunity to listen to David Warlick. Below are my notes, and I hope to have more reflections and audio soon.

David began with sharing that he always begins his presentation with something he didn’t know yesterday. That was DoodleBuzz.com (updated thanks to comment by Lydia!), which allows you to graphically keep track of news.

“Begin your preso with something you didn’t know yesterday.” We have to rethink what it is to be educated, redefine the 21st Century–>Be a master learner as a teacher. If it’s our job to help children be lifelong learners, then that’s what we need to do.

You can find David’s handouts online at http://davidwarlick.com/handouts. If you blog the preso, make sure to use these tags: native, information, experience, warlick.

Access to insights other educators are sharing.

Backchannel Tool: Knitterchat.com and Mindmeister.com – Prepared preso in this. [Transparency/disclosure]

He shared that Anshut Sammar, 13 year old student…then he asked, What’s different?

What’s different is that this student doesn’t have ceilings. Ceilings were imposed by a non-networked world. Abundant access to information…it’s also difficult to contain If You want learners to excel, free their information…”containerless.”

He shared Assassin’s Creed 2 as an example of what games can do. What are the rules of the games? What are the goals? How do you use the rules to achieve the goals? It all begins with questions. About games, what is it about the experience that makes it an effective learning experience?

Fueled by questions…learn by asking questions. He introduced WeFeelFine.org as a vision of what is possible. David asked, “Imagine growing up in a world that is connected…profound implications on how students learn.” Some other web sites he shared–such as to demonstrate the visualization of Good Mornings (blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/goodmorning)–and Scratch. David discussed gold farming–preparing a character for online virtual world, then selling those virtual assets via eBay. This has been prohibited.

He mentioned Ian Fogarty from New Brunswick, Canada – creating labs manuals that are interactive. He also mentioned Amy McLeod, who asked her students to create movie trailers to motivate next year’s students to read books/plays like Shakespeare’s Othello.

Darren Kuropatwa was also mentioned positively for his work encouraging students to scribe math classes.

One of the memorable quotes David shared was that a student said:

My grammar is not good enough for my ideas…

David made the point that grammar is a tool that had value for communication. Some questions:

  • How does the assignment talk back?
  • Demands personal investment?
  • How is work valuable and to whom?
  • How am I assessing valuable mistakes?
  • It’s what you know that’s different that brings value to organizations.
  • Help kids build things of value.

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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

TxVSN Presentation at TECSIG Fall 2009

15 Thursday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, OnlineLearning, Podcast, TCEA, TECSIG, Texas, TxVSN

≈ Leave a comment

At the TCEA TEC-SIG event, I had the opportunity to listen to Barbara Smith from the Texas Virtual School Network (TxVSN). She shared lots of great information in her slideshow presentation and was kind enough to allow me to post that information below.

Listen to Podcast of Barbara’s Presentation on TxVSN
This podcast is pretty “bare-bones” since I didn’t have any of my audio files with me…basically a short intro and then Barbara!

Tx Vsn Tec Sig

View more presentations from mguhlin.

In addition to important timelines and updates regarding pricing, I found these 7 Steps to Virtual Learning below to be helpful for Texas districts:

7 Steps to TxVSN Participation

  1. Complete txvsn agreement-superintendent signature needed
  2. Needs assessment – online
  3. Activate Campuses – Confirm Admin
  4. Site Coordinators Register/Train
  5. Pre-assess student readiness – Request Readi Secondary Accounts
  6. Student data upload to registration
  7. Finance Approver – just in case

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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

TCEA Launches Twitter Contest

14 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in EdTech

≈ Leave a comment

Check out this new contest from TCEA folks:


Get Your Tweet On!

What’s YOUR message? Many times educators may feel they’re alone on an island. If you could place a message in a bottle to share with the world, what would it say? Who would you hope to receive it? Let the bottle become your vehicle to deliver your message.

Come tweet with us! Beginning Nov. 2, 2010 tweet your “message in a bottle” to twitter.com/tcea. Begin your tweet with “My message in a bottle is:”

Message in a bottle should pertain to education (not limited to technology), the classroom, students, administration, funding, assessment, community or technology. Freely express yourself and send us your message in a bottle.

Messages will be narrowed down to the top picks and will be voted on by TCEA members. Winner will be announced at the TCEA 2010 Convention & Exposition in February 2010.

  • Contest ends Jan. 8, 2010
  • Grand Prize $1,000
  • Contest is not limited to TCEA members. Re-tweet us and invite your followers to submit their message.
  • You do not need to attend TCEA 2010 to be eligible to win


TCEA board members and staff are not eligible to participate. Voting will take place Jan. 18-22, 2010 at http://www.tcea.org.


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

MyNotes – The Loophole Generation

13 Tuesday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in MyNotes

≈ Leave a comment

  • Innovate: The Loophole Generation
    • The Loophole Generation
      Jennifer Summerville and John Fischetti
    • An increasing number of students spend considerable energy seeking, finding, and negotiating loopholes in online course assignments. While this behavior is not new or shocking, the anonymous, self-driven nature of online classes may exacerbate the tendency (Kennedy et al. 2000). Rather than the exception, this behavior is becoming the rule.
    • today it is common for a parent to e-mail administrators and professors for explanations about a child’s poor performance in class (White 2005). This sort of intervention often moves the focus away from the student’s performance to a negotiation among multiple parties about grades.
    • Enlarging the role of tests has had a chilling effect on the curriculum, as it has compelled educators to spend more time on test preparation and memorization at the expense of project-based learning, open-ended assignments, and inquiry-based instructional approaches.
    • Trained to be good test takers, they frequently arrive in the college classroom unprepared to take charge of their own learning and to pursue knowledge as independent thinkers.
    • Loophole Generation to describe a group of students whose approach to coursework is influenced by the ease of online communication, hovering parents, a limited sense of intellectual curiosity, and a lack of experience in solving problems imaginatively.
    • These students spend their time (and their instructors’ time) exploiting gaps in class policies or assignments—sometimes spending more time than would be necessary to complete a particular project in the first place. This behavior emerges from the conditions prevalent in K-12 education and is likely to manifest itself in the post-academic careers of loophole-seeking students as well (Lanier 2006).
    • Many students work on online course assignments very late in the night or very early in the morning, including when they are very tired or subject to various influences or distractions. The online medium also creates a sense of empowerment to demand certain privileges that a student would not ask for (or would ask for in a more professional manner) in face-to-face situations (Zimmerman and Milligan 2007).
    • Plagiarism.org points out, “The Internet now makes it easy to find thousands of relevant sources in seconds, and in the space of a few minutes plagiarists can find, copy, and paste together an entire term paper or essay” (2007, ¶2).
    • McCabe and Trevino (1996) reported that 15% of all students they studied had submitted a paper obtained in large part from a term paper mill or Web site, and 52% had copied a few sentences from a Web site without citing the source. Instant messaging, blogs, and online chats often appear to be anonymous, and a participant’s sense of what is appropriate in those cyberspace interactions may differ from his or her view of suitable face-to-face encounters (Summerville & Fischetti 2005). As Patchin and Hinduja (2006) observe, “Although ‘power’ in traditional bullying might be physical (stature) or social (competency or popularity), online power may simply stem from proficiency” (152).
    • Four types of loophole-seeking strategies
    • Online teachers constantly hear pleas such as “the system was down,” “I have a virus on my computer,” or “I sent you the wrong attachment.”
    • The Bully is particulary problematic because of his or her potential to disrupt the work of other students. The bully can cast a pall over an entire class, often by combining negative comments with personal insults, threats, and harassment. Some bullies use derogatory or flippant language in discussions and postings that they would not use in live settings. Communications technology can enable this behavior, making students feel less pressure to moderate their self-presentation.
    • The Cheater may use a wide variety of techniques used to avoid work. He or she may copy entire assignments from another classmate, submit work posted as examples by the professor as his or her own, contribute little to no work to group projects, have someone else help with an online test, or purchase an entire paper from an online retailer. These students are fully aware of what they are doing.
    • The Plagiarizer specializes in creating a mosaic of several sources and presenting the results as his or her own. Many such students have plagiarized their way through high school and basic studies courses in college, often without completing any project that consists of something other than borrowed information (Stengold 2004). The ease of access to an abundance of materials on the Web makes this easy to accomplish, and the emphasis on test-taking in K-12 education has influenced many students to seek answers rather than to explore questions.
    • Crafting policies and designing assignments that thwart these strategies will help preserve the academic integrity of online courses and reacquaint students with the virtues of imaginative problem solving. Educators need to design coursework that rewards independent thought and squashes the idea that loopholing is a productive use of time.
    • instructors must outline clear expectations and governing policies in the course syllabus. One effective method for ensuring that students know the rules is to have them sign and return a course agreement at the very beginning of class
    • Functioning like an employee handbook, the agreement governs how the class operates and keeps everyone on the same page, thwarting the behavior of bullies, cheaters, and plagiarizers.
    • Instructors must also foreground the goal of closing loopholes when designing assignments and crafting assessments. The language used in a syllabus designed for an online class must be unambiguous. Excuse makers, for example, will find vague terms or point system glitches and create openings for appeals, demands, and grievances. Creating varied, novel, and authentic forms of assessment will help motivate students to see assignments differently (Christe 2003).
    • Tying assessments to the career goals of students is one effective strategy. If students must create products that may be useful in a future workplace, they will have more of a stake in the outcome of their studies. Assigning projects that require individual interpretation of content unique to the course will make cheating more difficult. Acquiring answers to a multiple-choice exam or copying an entire essay to satisfy a general question can be easy to do, depending on how the exam is designed. It is inherently more difficult for students to complete a project with real applicability, such as an individual lesson plan or marketing strategy that uses details unique to the course.
    • Creating assignments that combine independent and group work is another effective way to manage student behavior in an online class. This approach provides opportunities to assess students in two different working situations and lets them practice both self-direction and collaboration. Assessment of group work should include peer-and-self reporting, which prompts students to reflect on the project and gives group members incentive to do their fair share (Exhibit 3).
    • Connecting academic projects to their career expectations can effectively impress students with the concept of consequences for unacceptable behavior and, in particular, minimize or expose the bully.
    • A test bank with randomized answers that change each semester can eliminate opportunities for outright cheating. Timing the exam while allowing an open-note environment is another good option. Students feel less pressure to cheat when they are allowed to use notes and are better able to analyze and synthesize information. This approach requires well-constructed, high-order questions so that content is assessed through interpreting, synthesizing, and analyzing rather than through recalling basic facts. It is also crucial to make sure that students understand the difference betwen open note, which may be allowed, and “open neighbor,” which is not.
    • today’s course management systems include a variety of tools that allow instructors to monitor the progress of students. If these tools are to be used, students should be informed that their interactions are recorded (Christe 2003).
    • Teachers can educate students about the connections between ethical behavior in class and in the workplace, and they can strengthen these ties by adopting some common workplace rules in the classroom.
    • Teachers should use a similar procedural awareness and acceptance policy in their course delivery. The first acknowledgement is the student’s signed agreement of the university’s acceptable use policy, published as part of all official catalogues and signed off on by each student at the time an e-mail account is created. The second acknowledgement is student acceptance of the specific course rules or code of conduct. This formal act at the beginning of a class, which could be included in the course agreement, indicates that a student is aware of the university policies and specific course interpretations of those policies. The third acknowledgement specifies the actual violation and the teacher’s response.
    • Teachers should converse with all colleagues about student ethics, since these issues are not unique to online learning.
    • create a culture that mentors students toward appropriate and informed attitudes about academic honesty.
    • Web sources such as Turnitin.com are facing legal challenges that will likely lead to further clarification in the courts regarding how online tools can be used to safeguard academic integrity (Foster 2002). This reality increases the need for teachers to develop assignments and assessments that are more cheat proof and to have a clear procedural awareness and acceptance policy.
    • We can teach students that doing their own work is rewarding and lead them by example, but students of the Loophole Generation who are so inclined will continue to find our unintended course and program loopholes. Through continued refinement of syllabi and stronger rubrics for assignments, we can better anticipate how the habits and personal motivations that guide the lives of our students might clash with deadlines for quality work. We can close many of the loopholes and help convince students who are tempted to exploit them that maybe, just maybe, finding loopholes in lieu of doing the work simply is not worth the effort.
    • This article may be reproduced and distributed for educational purposes if the following attribution is included in the document:

      Note: This article was originally published in Innovate (http://www.innovateonline.info/) as: Summerville, J., and J. Fischetti. 2007. The loophole generation. Innovate 4 (2). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=343 (accessed October 13, 2009). The article is reprinted here with permission of the publisher, The Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Stop the Spread of Flu – Prevention Tips

12 Monday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, SwineFlu, Texas

≈ Leave a comment

The school district i live in recently sent me this message:

North East ISD is committed to maintaining a healthy school environment for our children. The district created a video called “The 3C’s” to inform elementary students about flu prevention. The video covers the 3 C’s of prevention: clean, cover and contain.

The video is posted on the school district’s 2009 Flu Page, which you can access by clicking the link below. We hope that you will share this short video with your family.

Click on this link http://www.neisd.net/ComRel/Flu2009.htm then look for “Stop the Spread of Flu – Remember the 3C’s (a video)” which is fourth on the list.

Thank you and stay healthy.

Check out their video…what has your school district done?


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

David Warlick in Texas at TCEA TEC-SIG

12 Monday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, TCEA, TECSIG, Texas

≈ Leave a comment

One of my favorite storytellers is David Warlick, and he’ll be coming to Texas for the TCEA Technology Education Coordinators Special Interest Group (TEC-SIG) meeting being held this week! More on his presentation below the flyers….There are other exciting speakers as well!

Micha Villarreal shared the following flyer and I encourage you all to join TCEA, TEC-SIG ($10 membership fee…great!) and attend the meeting ($40) that will be held on Thursday and Friday of this week!! The meeting cost is $40 and you can sign up online or at the door.

Click on the images below to see them full-size.

David shares hints of his upcoming talk online via his blog…here are some of the relevant parts:

Cracking the “Native” Information Experience

The ringing proclamation at ISTE 2010 will be “Integrate Technology.” There is a lot of value in this mantra, but it is the response of a generation of teachers who grew up without computers, mobile phones, and the Internet. It all looks like technology to us.

To our students, it is merely the road ways of their daily and minute-by-minute travels and the tentacles of their nearly constant hyper-connectively. It is the hands and feet that take them where they want to go. Believing that our youngsters carry their mobile phones around with them because it is their technology of choice is a poor reason to desperately carve out ways of using mobile tech in our lessons. They carry their phones because that is where their friends are — and their is nothing new about youngsters wanting to be where their friends are.

What is new is the nature of their interactions and the culture that they have grown out of their hyper-connectivity. Cracking the Native Information Experience will seek to reach beyond the technology, identifying and exploring the unique qualities of our students’ outside the classroom activities. What is the code that makes their video games, social networks, and texting so ingrained in their lives, and how might we crack that code.

The code itself comes from work that I did with a group of teachers in Irving, Texas, a school district that has operated, since 1997, based on students having ubiquitous access (1:1) to networked, digital, and abundant information. In an online collaborative activity we identified and then factored down the elements of their students information activities that seemed to result in active learning, as opposed to the passive learning their predecessors had endured.

See you there!


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

FSArchiver – Backup/Restore Just the Files

12 Monday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in CommandLine, FreeSoftware, HDBackupRestore, TechTips, UbuntuLinux

≈ 1 Comment

UPDATE 11/16/2009: You may want to read this summary article on a variety of backup/restore and reimaging options available for different operating systems. 

My favorite hard drive partition backup tool in the past has been Partimage. It works pretty well. In this blog entry, I document my successful attempt to use FSArchiver, a free utility on the SystemRescue (Linux) media.

Although I’m an old hand at using Partimage to backup a hard drive, I was a bit stymied by a new hard drive configuration that is much larger than I’m accustomed to. This means, Partimage creates a file that is very large and can take quite awhile to back a partition to…worse, the backup media I have is more along the 120gig variety rather than 500gig needed for a 230gig Partimage file, even compressed (229gig compressed).

As a result, I’m now looking for a solution that backs up ONLY what’s on the hard drive and nothing else. But how do you do that? I investigated the Free Space solution for DD but I haven’t quite seen a good example to try out, and I’m not sure what to do.

Another possible solution is FSArchiver, although it’s still in development. A little about FSArchiver below, which comes installed on a SystemRescue CD (which can be easily copied to a USB flash drive with UNETBOOTIN):

FSArchiver is a system tool that allows you to save the contents of a file-system to a compressed archive file. The file-system can be restored on a partition which has a different size and it can be restored on a different file-system.

Unlike tar/dar, FSArchiver also creates the file-system when it extracts the data to partitions. Everything is checksummed in the archive in order to protect the data. If the archive is corrupt, you just lose the current file, not the whole archive. Fsarchiver is released under the GPL-v2 license. It’s still under heavy development so it must not be used on critical data.

That said, I’m trying this solution out and hoping it will work. Here’s a comparison chart between FSArchiver and Partimage. Some of the features that jump out at me include the following:

  • Ability to restore the filesystem to a partition which is smaller than the original
  • Ability to restore the filesystem to a partition which is bigger than the original
  • Ability to do multi-threaded compression which is faster on recent computer with multiple cores/cpu
  • Ability to encrypt the data with a password

Anyone else have experience with this or can recommend an alternate solution that does what FSArchiver does?
Update 10/13/2009: While waiting for feedback, I decided to go ahead and try FSArchiver out on a Dell Latitude 2100 netbook. My hope is that the backup and restore process will work quickly. The process I followed is basically this one:

  1. Booted from my SystemRescue USB Flash Drive
  2. Since I’m working on a Dell Latitude 2100 netbook, I used the Altker32 on the System Rescue menu that popped up.
  3. I formatted a 120gig USB External drive to ext3 file system (as opposed to FAT32) to use as my backup drive with this command (Skip this step if you have a drive already formatted and ready to go):
    mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdd1
  4. In anticipation of “mounting” the external drive, I created a directory at “/mnt/backup” using this command:
    mkdir /mnt/backup
  5. Then, mounted the external drive (/dev/sdd1) as “/mnt/backup” using this command:
    mount -t ext3 /dev/sdd1 /mnt/backup
  6. I changed to that directory with this command:
    cd /mnt/backup
  7. Began the backup process using FSArchiver by typing:
    fsarchiver savefs /mnt/backup/netbook.fsa /dev/sda2
    This created a 5.8 gig file, which is an improvement over what Partimage would have done trying to backup a 230 gig hard drive partition! Here is the report FSArchiver gave me at the end of its process:
    Statistics for filesystem 0
    * files successfully processed:….regfiles=37329, directories=4308,symlinks=2,hardlinks=3,specials=0
    *files with errors:…………………..regfiles=0, directories=0, symlinks=0, hardlinks=0, specials=0
  8. When the backup process was completed, I restored the backup using the command below:
    fsarchiver restfs /mnt/backup/netbook.fsa id=0,dest=/dev/sda2

    Here is the report I received from FSArchiver when it was done:
    Statistics for filesystem 0
    * files successfully processed:….regfiles=37329, directories=4308, symlinks=2, hardlinks=3, specials=0
    *files with errors: regfiles=0, directories=0, symlinks=0,hardlinks=0,specials=0
    The restore process took 18 minutes, which is great!

To test whether this process worked, I restarted the netbook to see if the file system was restored successfully. What I didn’t notice is that Windows had not been shut down, but was just sleeping. The restore process didn’t change that.

So, successful test of FSArchiver!!

The next thing to do is figure out how to compress the backup file (that’s not hard) and uncompress it while restoring the partition. I’ll probably have to head to the FSArchiver forums for that one!

Update 10/13/2009; 5:43PM: Forum Response
Here’s what I posted in the forums:

Howdy! If I compress a partition backup with the following command:
fsarchiver savefs -z2 /mnt/backup/netbook.fsa /dev/sda2

what command do I need to restore it so that it uncompresses the compressed archive?

The response came a few hours later:

fsarchiver has built-in compression, and 9 levels are available: -z1 is very quick and provides bad compression, and -z9 is very slow and provides very good compresison. You only have to choose the level when you do the “savefs”. It will automatically uncompress it during the “restfs”. If you have more than one core in your cpu, you can make the compression faster using -j2 (for two compression threads), -j4, …

The quick start guide, and the page about compression will give you more details:
http://www.fsarchiver.org/QuickStart
http://www.fsarchiver.org/Compression

The answer is that it automatically uncompresses during restfs, or “restore file system.”

One of the things I missed in my first read of the quickstart was being able to split files into various sizes. This is great if your backup drive is FAT32 and can’t handle a 5.8 gig file or if you want to burn individual files to DVD.

So, my second test for FSArchiver is as follows:

  • Compress using compression level 3 (gzip -6 equivalent) with -z3 option
  • Use second processor (-j2 option)
  • Size backup files to 700megs each with the -s 700 option

That FSArchiver backup command I’m trying is as follows:

fsarchiver savefs -z3 -j2 -s 700 /mnt/udrive/netbook2.fsa /dev/sda2

That means that the command to restore the system will be as follows:

fsarchiver restfs -j2 /mnt/udrive/netbook2.fsa id=0, dest=/dev/sda2

Let’s see how it goes….

Ok, here’s my measures for the update:

  • Time to Backup Compressed – 30 minutes
  • Created 7 files at 733megs each, and one at 678megs

I’m going to restore now my first backup, then if that works, restore my second backup to test them both. Crossing my fingers!

Update 6:46 PM: Ok, it all worked awesomely!!!


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Eracism

12 Monday Oct 2009

Posted by mguhlin in Education, Web2.0

≈ 2 Comments

What a fascinating concept…ERacism. Have your students apply to participate….

Find more videos like this on Flat Classroom Conference

Flat Classroom Projects ™ are very excited to be launching a NEW project for Middle School (Grade 7/8 levels are perfect) called ERACISM. You are invited to APPLY to be part of this pilot project starting VERY SOON. We need schools from around the world to submit teams to make this conversation and debate real!

More details about Eracism can be found on the website at http://www.eracismproject.org/index.html

Please let me know if you have any questions, and please circulate this within your schools and beyond. We need to start this project VERY SOON! This could be run within a language arts/ humanities class (or other!) or as an extra curricular activity with a group such as the student council or MUN team as an extra opportunity to interact globally to enhance understanding.

Thanks everyone!
Julie
_________________________
“Creating the Future”
Julie Lindsay
IT and E-Learning Coordinator
Beijing (BISS) International School
Tel: +8610 6443 3151/2/3
Flat Classroom Projects co-founder
– http://flatclassroomproject.org
lindsay.julie@gmail.com
Twitter/Skype/Delicious: julielindsay
Blog: http://123elearning.blogspot.com
Wiki: http://julielindsay.wikispaces.com
http://www.retaggr.com/Card/julielindsay

More about eracism:

About Eracism: Invented by Students for Students to Bring About Global Understanding

This project truly bridges the divide in many ways, from the creation of the project (See the original student video) – the global voting of this project as the “winner” and student planning of the presentation topic (occurring August 2009) – students from around the world have been involved in this project from the moment it was conceived in a human brain. This presentation bridges the divide between culture, schools, countries, and even bandwidth by providing low-bandwidth methods for participants. Additionally, it bridges the divide between the conference participants, teachers, and students by providing background information and then immersing the participants in the live culmination of the project and by providing a method for students, teachers, and K12online participants to discuss and shape future iterations of the project. This is truly not only flattening the “classroom” for the students but flattening the conference by using it as a conduit to bring students, teachers, experts, and learners together in a rich, symbiotic relationship.

I have some questions but not the time to ask them right now…I hope I can follow up. In the meantime, I’m sharing this information in response to a request from a colleague, Kim Caise, to get the word out.


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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

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