Susan Davis on Learning Blogs

http://gettingsmart.com/2015/01/raising-student-bloggers-open-letter-parents

Raising Student Bloggers: An Open Letter to Parents

BLOG SERIES , SMART TEACHERS 

31 SHARES

January 8, 2015

By Susan Lucille Davis 

For the past few months, your student, if he or she is in an İngilizce class like mine , has plunged head first into the world of blogging. They've Offered up observations about the world, described them the passions, and discovered new ideas and information shared with others through self-directed research. This is what writing looks like in the 21st century. 

Your student has learned how to find a focus and a voice, to shape into meaningful thoughts Statements made up of carefully chosen words, well-crafted sentences, Paragraphs organized, insightful images, practical links, tags and helpful. Your student has to write to invite commentary and interaction from others and to document the evolution of them are thinking. He or she has learned how to extend the conversations raised by the blogging peers through Questioning and thoughtful commentary. Your student has developed essential skills in modern-day communication.

And we've just begun. Now it's time for you to become more involved in your student's growth as a learner who actively shares her best feeling it (and evolving) self with the world.

Talk about Blogs and Blogging

What is your understanding of blogs and blogging? Show your student what it means to be an active participant in the blogosphere by reading blogs together, talking about what goes into them, considering them the challenges, and learning more about the way blogs permeate and affect our culture.

If you already read the blogs on subjects that interest you and your student, share them. Explain why you read them and what you learn; describe how you achieve balance by looking at multiple Viewpoints. Show how you interact with the blog, how you question what is said, how you spin off into new ideas of your own. Explore the ways a blogger makes choices to get an idea across it to make a particular impact on a reader.

Discuss your comfort level with the privacy and professionalism (or lack of it) Adopted by the blogs you follow, and show how you might handle similar in circumstances. Have a conversation about what it means to be kind and respectful in an online space, why it matters that we should be good digital Citizens online ( Cyberwis to , Started by parents of digital-age Students, is a great source of information). Remind your student, when Necessary, to follow basic Practices for online safety (not revealing last names or sharing personal data such as phone numbers, addresses, or when you might be away from home).

If you are not yet a reader of blogs, ask your student about blogging and spend some time seeking out blogs that are related to the Activities you enjoy sharing together. Learn from the breadth of writing online how much a blog can do.

Reinforce Learning

Ask how it feels to block. Talk about a blog's inherent transparency - what does this mean exactly? Authentically Talk about the impact of writing for a real audience who may talk back. How was this different from other kinds of writing your student may do? Discuss your student's response to taking ownership of their own learning is through blogging.

Help your student reflect on what he or she does and how they learn through blogging. How do they make meaning and take without risk, and go beyond a mere recitation of content? What results from the sharing their passions and interests with others? How do they grow in a personal as well as academic sense? What does your child think about possibly connecting with experts who can further feel that every learning? How does a blog will allow your student to document their growth over time she thinking?

Now that your student has begun to think of him or herself as a practicing writer, how is he or she is improving as a writer? It's importante here to ask for reflections rather than step in and offer your own critique. What does he think he's doing better? What does she recognize that she needs to work on in order to make all blogs stand out and have the impact on a reader she wants to have? How do they want to experiment in the writing them?

Become a Fan

Every writer needs readers, so now it's time for you to become your blogger's first fan. Read your student-blogger's posts and interact in person as well as online. In addition, share them with other trusted blogs, nurturing adults. Greg Nadeau offers insights about how parents can support them are children's learning in the sense 2013 tedxbeaconstreet Talk, "Blogs and Badges: The Future of Learning." I like feeling idea of ​​Midwest Sugata Mitra's "Granny Cloud" concept by suggesting that parents select four other adults importante in each student-blogger's life to become loyal readers and responders.

As you become comfortable with sharing your child's work as a parent, you can promote the child's blog through social media. Is seeking a broad, authentic audience can enhance the student's learning even further.

Adult readers should offer essential positive reinforcement for hard work, original ideas, perseverance. It's importante to realize, however, that the child is the one who must put forth the effort, make mistakes, and reap the benefits of learning from experience. Adult readers can also encourage experimentation and engage the student-blogger in conversations about the topic at hand by asking sincere questions that the blogger nudge towards deeper thinking.

Imagine the Bigger Picture

By interacting honestly, responsibly, and supportively with student-bloggers, trusted adults can help student-bloggers grow as writers and thinkers, as communicators who have something of value to add to today's world. Interacting on a global scale will be a large part of their Lives. Helping them understand how to engage productively and creatively with the readers beyond the boundaries of their daily experience is a huge gift for today's students.

By conversing with student bloggers, in person and online, adult readers can learn along with them as they celebrate successes and improve upon mistakes, as they take chances with what they do not know and demonstrat on how their are learning happens. What better way to stay in touch with them as they grow up? And once they've come this far, we can than open up their blogs to the world!

In the long run, an authentic, worldwide audience for blogging can also help students The see them will work as something worthy of sharing with others - and raise the bar for their online presence overall. Ultimately, those same Students can use their blogs as seeds for a digital Portfolios that will give them room to curate and display the evidence of them is learning throughout their Lives. What a powerful way for students The guiding learners into the online experts and they will become!

For more on student blogging, check out:

• Blogging Basics: This Is How We Roll
• Blogging as Writing Curriculum
• 6th-Graders Have Their Say: Why Students Value Blogging

Susan Lucille Davis

Susan Lucille Davis Teaches 7th- and 8th-grade İngilizce at the 'Iolani School in Honolulu, HI. Follow Susan on Twitter atsuludavis.

Ways to Improve Assessments

The Council of Chief State School Officers and the country's largest school districts have spoken out in favor of reducing the number of standardized tests students take. The national teachers unions and other traditionally Democratic groups are on board with the idea too.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan says he is concerned about testing too, but he has written he "strongly believes" in annual tests as an educational tool.

Missing from this debate, however, is a sense of what could replace annual tests. What would the nation do to monitor learning and ensure equity and accountability if states didn't have to test every child every year?

More On Testing

The Test

Why Our Schools Are Obsessed With Standardized Testing, but You Don't Have to Be

by Anya Kamenetz

Hardcover, 272 pagespurchase

• parenting & families
• nonfiction

More on this book:

• NPR reviews, interviews and more

Here are four possible answers. They're not necessarily mutually exclusive. In fact, they could all happen at the same time, as different states and districts make different decisions.

1) Sampling. A simple approach. The same tests, just fewer of 'em. Accountability could be achieved at the district level by administering traditional standardized tests to a statistically representative sampling of students, rather than to every student every year.

That's how the "Nation's Report Card" works. Formally known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, it's one of the longest-running and most trusted tests in the U.S. education arsenal, even though it's not attached to high stakes. It's given to a different sample of students each year, ingrades 4, 8 and 12. The widely respected international testPISA is given to a sample of students too.

2) Stealth assessment. Similar math and reading data, but collected differently.

The major textbook publishers, plus companies like Dreambox, Scholastic and the nonprofit Khan Academy, all sell software for students to practice math and English. These programs register every single answer a student gives.

The companies that develop this software argue that it presents the opportunity to eliminate the time, cost and anxiety of "stop and test" in favor of passively collecting data on students' knowledge over a semester, year or entire school career. Valerie Shute, a professor at Florida State University and former principal research scientist at ETS, coined the term "stealth assessment" to describe this approach.

Stealth assessment doesn't just show which skills a student has mastered at a given moment. The pattern of answers potentially offers insights into how quickly students learn, how diligent they are and other big-picture factors.

"Invisible, integrated assessment, to me, is the future," Kimberly O'Malley, the senior vice president of school research at Pearson Education, told me. "We can monitor students' learning day to day in a digital scenario. Ultimately, if we're successful, the need for, and the activity of, stopping and testing will go away in many cases."

Applying this approach on a national scale using scientific methods has never been done, in part because the products are still new. It would probably require a large outlay in terms of software, professional training and computer equipment — and would result in a corresponding windfall for companies like Pearson.

3) Multiple measures. Incorporate more, and different, kinds of data on student progress and school performance into accountability measures.

Statewide longitudinal data systems now track students in most states from pre-K all the way through high school (and in some states, college). That means accountability measures and interventions don't have to depend on the outcome of just one test. They could take a big-data approach, combining information from a number of different sources — graduation rates, discipline outcomes, demographic information, teacher-created assessments and, eventually, workforce outcomes. This information, in turn, could be used to gauge the performance of students, schools and teachers over time.

As part of a multiple-measures approach, some districts are also collecting different kinds of information about students.

3a) Social and emotional skills surveys. Research shows that at least half of long-term chances of success are determined by nonacademic qualities like grit, perseverance and curiosity. As states expand access to pre-K, they are including social and emotional measures in their definitions of "high quality" preschool. As one component of a multiple-measures system, all schools could be held accountable for cultivating this half of the picture.

The Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland survey both students and teachers on social and emotional factors and use the results to guide internal decision-making. The district uses the Gallup student poll, a 20-question survey that seeks to measure levels of hope, engagement and well-being.

"Engagement" is basically a measure of how excited students are to be in the building. Last year, 875,000 students took the Gallup poll nationwide, in grades 5-12. According to one study, student hope scores on this poll do a better job of predicting college persistence and GPA than do high school GPA, SATs or ACT scores.

3b) Game-based assessments.

Video-game-like assessments, such as those created by GlassLab and the AAA lab at Stanford, are designed to get at higher-order thinking skills. These games are designed to test things like systems thinking or the ability to take feedback — measures that traditional tests don't get at. Of course, they are still in their infancy.

3c) Performance or portfolio-based assessments.

Schools around the country are incorporating direct demonstrations of student learning into their assessment programs. These include projects, individual and group presentations, reports and papers and portfolios of work collected over time. The New York Performance Standards Consortium consists of 28 schools, grades 6-12, throughout New York State that rely on these teacher-created assessments to the exclusion of standardized tests. These public schools tend to show higher graduation rates and better college-retention rates, while serving a population similar to that of other urban schools.

4) Inspections.

Scotland is a place where you can see many of the approaches above in action. Unlike the rest of the U.K., it has no specifically government-mandated school tests. Schools do administer a sampling survey of math and literacy, and there is a series of high-school-exit/college-entrance exams that are high stakes for students. But national education policy emphasizes a wide range of approaches to assessment, including presentations, performances and reports. These are designed to measure higher-order skills like creativity, students' well-being and technological literacy as well as traditional academics. Schools and teachers have a lot of control over the methods of evaluation.

At the school level, Scotland maintains accountability through a system of government inspections that has been in place in the U.K. since 1833. Inspectors observe lessons, look at student work and interview both students and staff members.

This piece is adapted in part from The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed With Standardized Testing, But You Don't Have To Be (PublicAffairs, 2015).

Road Schooling resources

http://wandrlymagazine.com/article/winter-travel/roadschooling-101/

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415682855/

xAPI advice from Jim Goodell

From Jim Goodell:

An online activity might track every click, as a separate verb, but for offline activities I'd say the statement might represent a completed activity, something like:

URLs can be used as parts of the statement...

Actor = "https://plus.google.com/108636986437967834022/posts"
[identifier for Charlie, e.g. blog profile page URL, so...]

Verb = "https://ceds.ed.gov/CEDSElementDetails.aspx?TermId=7869#Completed "
["Completed"]

Object = [URL to "Bird House Activity" ...which could be the blog page in this case, but normally just describe the activity or learning resource, not the personal experience]

Result = "http://scrollsfromsircharlie.blogspot.com/2014/12/carpenter-who.html"

...then the "Bird House Activity" page should have human readable info describing the activity and LRMI metadata tags that give info including the alignment to learning objectives, e.g. LRMI has alignmentObject, CEDS has Learning Standard Item Association Type, e.g. "Bird House Activity" "assesses, requires, teaches" "[URL to adding fractions learning standard]"

So the statements are just identifiers, URIs that can be resolved to discover richer meaning. 

Report on P20 SLDSs

States are making progress building longitudinal databases that link individual students’ performance in K-12 with their experience in the workplace, but have been slowed a bit by privacy concerns and other obstacles, according to a federal audit.

The Government Accountability Office produced the report for the Senate HELP Committee. Among the findings: More than half the 48 states that received federal database grants now have the ability to track individuals from their early education into the workforce.

States are using the databases for research on numerous topics, including identifying students at risk of academic failure; tracking whether STEM teachers are more likely to leave classrooms for the private sector; and comparing the earnings of high school and college graduates. Some states are producing data-driven reports that analyze how well individual schools prepare students for college or career. At least 39 states have developed a specific research agenda for their databases.

But states reported they were hampered by laws in several states prohibiting the use of Social Security numbers in K-12 data. The lack of the Social Security numbers makes it more difficult to match an individual student’s educational records with his workplace records, which could include wages, unemployment claims and welfare applications. States also reported heated political debates about the databases and the potential impact on privacy.


The federal government has distributed at least $640 million in grants to states to build the longitudinal databases since 2006. Most of that money has come through the Education Department, though some is from the Department of Labor.

Netflix Academy - Great Educational Videos

http://edexcellencemedia.net/wordpress/netflix-academy/

Horn on Blended Learning

Education Week

Published Online: December 9, 2014

Blended Learning Is About More Than Technology

By Michael B. Horn & Heather Staker

Battles between different philosophical camps in education are nothing new.

Whether it's knowledge vs. skills, memorization vs. project-based learning, small schools vs. comprehensive ones, the debates in education are often framed as a choice between "either-ors."

From John Dewey to Chester E. Finn Jr., countless education researchers have documented the fallacies in these dichotomies and the dangers of being too beholden to an "-ism," as Dewey wrote.

Many educators sense the folly as well. They know that at different times and in different circumstances, different approaches are best for students.

Despite this understanding, teachers are often handcuffed in their ability to steer their way toward a pragmatic middle ground. With limited blocks of time in a public school day and a set curriculum to work their way through, as well as the need to serve many students, each with unique learning needs, teachers must make trade-offs. More of one thing means less of another.

Blended learning—the mix of online and in-school learning—represents a way to break away from the trade-offs mentality, as Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen explains in the foreword to our new book, Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools. (Christensen is also the co-founder, with Michael B. Horn, of the Christensen Institute, where both of us work.)

Done right, blended learning breaks through the barriers of the use of time, place, path to understanding, and pace to allow each student to work according to his or her particular needs—whether that be in a group or alone, on practice problems or projects, online or offline. It preserves the benefits of the old and provides new benefits—personalization, access and equity, and cost control.

The question is how educators can capture these benefits. Blended learning is not inherently good or bad. It is a pathway to student-centered learning at scale to allow each child to achieve his or her fullest potential, but it is not a guaranteed success.

More generally, too many schools have crammed computers into their classrooms over the years—spending many billions of dollars, with little to show for it. It is not unusual to see a district adopt educational technology only to see costs rise and student achievement decline.

So, how to proceed? The first rule is simple, even if it is counterintuitive. Do not start with the technology.

Instead, schools should follow a tried-and-true design process to innovate successfully. The first step is to pick a rallying cry by identifying the problem to solve or the goal to achieve. Some problems relate to serving mainstream students in core subjects, while others arise because of gaps at the margins—where schools cannot offer a particular course, for example. Both areas are worthy of innovation. In either case, though, the problem or goal must not be about technology—such as trying to solve a "lack of devices"—and lead to a deployment of technology for technology's sake.

"Blended learning is not inherently good or bad. It is a pathway to student-centered learning at scale."

With the problem or goal identified, it is important to state it in a "SMART" way—specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and time-related—such that an organization will unambiguously know what success is and if it has been realized.

One common mistake is failing to bring the right people to the table to lead the effort. The result is that teachers are either stuck with tasks beyond their reach or too much bureaucratic oversight. Schools must match the right type of team and the right people to the scope of the problem.

The Milpitas, Calif., school district, for example, has created coordinating teams to support teachers innovating within their classrooms, and brought together heavyweight schoolwide design teams to rethink the very structure of some of their schools.

With the rallying cry in place and the right team organized, it is time to design. The starting point is to look at school from the viewpoint of students to understand what they are trying to accomplish in their lives and thus what motivates them. When leaders get the design right from their pupils' perspective, such that young people feel that school aligns perfectly with the things that matter to them, students arrive in class eager to learn.

This is not to say that educators should not instill certain core knowledge, skills, and dispositions in students, but that to accomplish these objectives seamlessly, schools should be intrinsically motivating. This means not only understanding what students are trying to accomplish, but also understanding the experiences they need to get those jobs done, and then assembling the right resources and integrating them in the right way to deliver those experiences.

We know that teachers are a crucial part of the student experience. But to gain teachers' buy-in, schools must work for teachers as well, which is why designing the teacher experience is the next step. Teachers have personal jobs to do in their lives, and the magic happens when schools offer experiences that are fulfilling for both students and teachers. Ensuring that teachers have opportunities to achieve, receive recognition, exercise responsibility, and advance and grow in their careers is critical. To provide teachers these motivators, institutions using blended learning are experimenting with extending the reach of great teachers, assigning teachers specialized responsibilities, employing team-teaching, awarding micro-credentials for achievement, and granting teachers increased authority.

The next step is the one where technology and devices finally enter the equation. The objective is to design the virtual and physical setup to align with the desired student and teacher experiences.

Some of the important questions that schools should ask when selecting content and software are: Should we build our own? Should we use one or multiple outside providers? Or should we adopt a facilitated-network solution—a platform that integrates modular content from a variety of sources? Considering devices—what type and how many—to match the software and student and teacher experiences is equally important.

Finally, teams should think through the physical environment in which students learn. Will the traditional egg-crate factory-model school design enable students and teachers to be successful? Or is a more modular environment that enables increased customization desirable? Increasing numbers of blended-learning programs are embracing the latter.

From here, it's time to put the vision into action. That means taking the choices from these different steps and piecing together a coherent instructional model.

After a team finishes designing, its work is still not done. Execution matters.

Schools must create the right culture. Blended learning accelerates a good culture and makes it great, but it will also accelerate a bad culture and make it terrible. Schools should also implement their designs with humility and acknowledge that it is unlikely that they will get the design right on the first try. Taking a discovery-driven approach to help school leaders identify and mitigate risks as they kick off a blended-learning program—and iterate accordingly—will help avoid costly mistakes both for students and a school's limited budget.

Blended learning is no panacea. It's a scalable strategy that can break the trade-offs inherent in the traditional school design to allow teachers to reach students in ways never before possible. But for it to work, school leaders must not start with blended learning or technology for its own sake, but instead undertake a careful design process to unlock its potential.

Michael B. Horn is the co-founder and executive director, education, of the Christensen Institute, a nonprofit think tank in San Mateo, Calif. Heather Staker is a senior research fellow at the Christensen Institute. They are the co-authors of Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools (Jossey-Bass, November 2014).

Vol. 34, Issue 14, Pages 22,28