Learning On The Job

The rain has stopped and the skies are (kinda) blue!

One of the foreign language teachers here at UNIS Hanoi is looking for schools and classrooms to collaborate with in French or Spanish.  In the past she has collaborated with the International School of Prague to discuss poverty in both the Czech Republic and Vietnam using a private Ning. At the end of the unit a Skype chat was organized so the students could participate in a debate and ‘meet’ each other.

A theme hasn’t been decided upon yet so if you’re interested  leave a comment below. I can put you two in touch and you can hash out some details.  Thanks!

Image Credit:
Ad – Macro’ed by bjmccray (CC BY NC ND on Flickr)

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Please excuse the brevity (and funny punctuation) of the next few blog posts. Being in Europe has its drawbacks: expensive internet cafes and funny keyboards.

At least, that”s what I hope it will look like! I”m only on the 5th day of the holiday, but thanks to Flickr, those are the things I”m hoping to see. You can travel anywhere in the world using other people”s photos, or you can harness the power of visual images using clear, sharp and near-professional photos.

Image Credits:

Nice-Cote-d’Azur-card by designer-wg.de

Contrails and the Pisa Tower by ccgd

relax in river to the Arno by pasma

Salzburg Cathedral by joiseyshowaa

Nuremberg: The City Clock by bill barber (very sporadic)

Relief…Bleriot-Plage, Calais by grange85

London Eye at Night by Philipp Klinger (in US & CDN 14/06 till 04/07)

Mermaid Quay by JohnGreenaway

Exposition Universelle by . SantiMB . (uninspired)

Please excuse the brevity (and funny punctuation) of the next few blog posts. Being in Europe has its drawbacks: expensive internet cafes and funny keyboards.

Teachers have always gotten around traditional copyright law, whether they knew it or not, by the “Fair Use” standards in place for education. While this serves us well, it will not always serve our students. Nor does traditional copyright laws take into account the instantaneous nature of sharing and remixing information.

Enter Creative Commons.

CC licensing is necessary in today”s world. It can, I think, be thought of as a community. I”ll use your images, music, etc. and you can use mine. There is nobody policing anything. It”s up to the individual users to ensure that they are abiding by the terms of the license that has been placed on the work by the creator.

I kind of like that idea when it comes to students: empowering people to ensure that they are using other people”s work responsibly.

To encourage me to post more often, I’ve expanded the focus of this blog. The majority of the items will still be teaching and technology focused, but I hope to include a little more flavor. Hence the change in the tag line – teaching, technology, movies, music, food, fun: welcome to my world. I’ve also changed the theme, although I don’t know if I’m happy with it. I was a bit over-anxious and (accidentally) switched themes before I was 100% certain. This might change again in the near future. Sorry if it’s a distraction…

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Here is the 1 minute video I made for the upcoming Google Teacher Academy in Mountain View on June 25. Fingers crossed and comments encouraged…

The Innovative Classroom – GTA 2008

Comments welcome!

[Edit: My first embed and I screw it up. Thanks MsMichetti for the heads up!]

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There has been a fantastic free-for-all going on over at Beyond School. I won’t get into the specifics - check it out for yourself;the real excitement is in the 75+ comments – but it has focused on, among other things, assessing students in an English Language Arts classroom. In this age, how much weight should be given to “traditional” writing assignments and what is the place for

At the same time, the Faculty Room has been giving assessment a closer look. Dan Meyer expounds on his system, which is well-suited for mathematics (I should know: I’ve adapted his strategy to implement an on-going revision of algebraic concepts in my Grade 8 class). Simon Cheatle gives his perspective from an international school in the Phillipines.

The American Paradigm

The vast majority of commentators present a very American slant on assessment. After spending the last 6 years overseas in truly international schools (my first two years were in a school that could have been situated in the middle of Iowa or California or North Carolina) I wonder why this American paradigm persists? Only in the arguments put forward by Grant Wiggins do I see any reference to criterion-based assessment. Being a mathematics teacher, I wonder how English teachers or History teachers go about grading an essay. How do you tell a B+ from an A-? Do you apply some sort of percentage? What do you do with the student who has a clear grasp of the language but a poor working knowledge of spelling? What do you do with the student who knows all of the grammar and structure protocols, but can’t present a reasoned argument? (For those who didn’t check it out, this is the initial focus of Clay Burell’s post.)

Enter Criteria

The answer, in my mind, is criterion-based grading. Why not separate the necessary skills of your course and grade each one appropriately? As an IB Middle Years Programme (MYP) school, we do exactly that. For example, in mathematics we assess four separate criteria: Knowledge and Understanding, Investigation of Patterns, Communication, and Reflection in Mathematics. If a student obviously knows the material but cannot present her information clearly, I can grade her higher in Knowledge and Understanding and lower in Communication. I don’t need to find a middle ground and she can know exactly what her strengths and weaknesses are.

A Step Further

At the end of the term, I look into my gradebook and find the highest sustained level of achievement for each criteria. I do not find the mean. If a student starts the year poorly but shows improvement, I reward that. If a student does poorly on one assessment task, it does not come back to hurt him.

Not Perfect

I will be the first person to admit that this system is not perfect. There is no room for formative assessments to influence the final grade, except as practice for the summative assessments. In my subject, life would be simpler to assign grades based on percentages. The assessment criteria, in my experience, lend themselves to major assessment tasks which are difficult to write, time consuming for students, and bloody hard to mark. Oh, and it’s a difficult system to get your head around, especially coming from The American Paradigm. Ask any other MYP teacher and they will probably have their own list of grievances.

The debate surrounding assessment is one that is necessary. There is no “right” answer as each teacher, school, and district is in a different situation. However, that doesn’t mean we should not strive to find that perfect way of assessing student performance. On the contrary, only by looking critically at our own practices and our motivations behind those practices can we, as professionals, ever hope to evolve.

 MYP Criteria

 sample-myp-gradebook.xls

grade-10-olympics-task.pdf

olympics-task-assessment-criteria-2008.pdf

I’ve thought about it.  I’ve pondered it.  I’ve debated it.  And now I’ve finally done it.  I’m part of the the blogosphere.  But am I just another teacher saying the same stuff?  Or can I actually say something worth reading?