Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/77898268530455682
http://gazette.teachers.net/gazette/wordpress/hal-portner/standards-assessments-rubrics/
Standards
Communicating Students convey information, describe process, and express ideas in accurate, engaging, and understandable ways.
Researching Students identify and access a variety of resources through which they retrieve and organize data they have determined to be authentic and potentially relevant to their task.
Thinking Critically Students use structured methods to weigh the relevance and impact of their decisions and actions against desired outcomes and adjust accordingly.
Thinking Creatively Students comprehend and employ principles of creative and productive problem solving to understand and mitigate real-world problems.
Keep in mind, however, that standards don’t prepare students for anything. They are a framework of expectations and educational objectives. Without the organization and processes to achieve them, they are worthless.
Student Assessment
Significance An instructionally useful assessment measures students’ attainment of a worthwhile curricular aim—for instance, a high-level cognitive skill or a substantial body of important knowledge.
Teachability An instructionally useful assessment measures something teachable. Teachability means that most teachers, if they deliver reasonably effective instruction aimed at the assessment’s targets, can get most of their students to master what the test measures.
Describability A useful assessment provides or is directly based on sufficiently clear descriptions of the skills and knowledge it measures so that teachers can design properly focused instructional activities.
Reportability An instructionally useful assessment yields results at a specific enough level to inform teachers about the effectiveness of the instruction they provide.
Nonintrusiveness In clear recognition that testing time takes away from teaching time, an instructionally useful assessment shouldn’t take too long to administer—it should not intrude excessively on instructional activities.
Performance Assessment
Rubrics
Please contact us through this blog, our social media and or emails, if you need to collaborate on projects involving Google Drive:
http://lrts.stcloudstate.edu/library/general/ims/default.asp
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Google-Drive-Docs-Lessons-Bundle-1065881
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/work_in_progress/2014/10/helping_students_develop_voice.html
Diane Ravitch blog on Anthony Cody’s book about his efforts to educate Bill Gates. The book is called “The Educator and the Oligarch: A Teacher Challenges Bill Gates.”
Anthony Cody is a teacher. For Cody, teaching is not just a job. It is his profession. It is his way of life. It is the place where his brain, his life experience, and his heart are joined.
With his blog as his platform, he trained his sights on the Gates Foundation. While others feared to criticize the richest foundation in the United States, Cody regularly devoted blogs to questioning its ideas and programs. He questioned its focus on standardized testing. He questioned its belief that teachers should be judged by the test scores of their students. He questioned its support for organizations that are anti-union and anti-teacher. He questioned its decision to create new organizations of young teachers to act as a fifth column within teachers’ unions, ready to testify in legislative hearings against the interests of teachers and unions.
http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/01/how-byod-programs-can-fuel-inquiry-learning/
Inquiry-based learning grounded in authentic projects go hand in hand with BYOD.
This shift allows teachers to address issues of digital citizenship like privacy, respecting others’ work, and standing up to improper uses on a daily basis as they arise.
“If they’re using that laptop in the classroom that has so much power and another kid is using a smartphone that doesn’t have quite that power or screen real estate, it requires collaboration,”
http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2014/07/mammoth-evernote-meets-tumblr.html
Mammoth is a bookmarking tool that seems to offer the key aspects of Evernote mixed with Tumblr.
Mammoth could be used as a project management tool. To use it to manage projects create a board and share it privately with your collaborators. Then use the board to share notes and assign tasks to each other.
Applications for Education
Mammoth could be a good tool for creating digital portfolios. Students could use Mammoth to showcase examples of their best work in a nice linear layout. Students can use Mammoth to share their portfolios publicly or share them only with you where you can give them feedback.
Alternative to MN eFolio
http://www.nmc.org/news/announcing-horizon-report-europe-2014-schools-edition
Key Trends Accelerating Educational Technology Adoption in European Schools
“Growing Ubiquity of Social Media” and “Rethinking the Roles of Teacher” as fast trends accelerating the adoption of educational technology in European schools over the next one to two years.
Full report:
college and universities are unable to offer the right training to faculty, staff and students. IT officials’ evaluations of their own institutions’ IT infrastructure present almost a mirror image of their list of priorities. While 81.4 percent of respondents listed faculty development as their top priority, only 27.9 percent rated their existing training offerings as excellent (or a seven on a seven-point scale). At 12.8 percent, IT training for students drew the second-lowest share of respondents giving it an excellent rating.
Wearable technologies survey – win an iPad Mini
You are invited to participate in a study of the current and potential applications of wearable technologies such as Google Glasses in Higher Education. If you choose to participate you will be asked to complete a confidential online survey that explores your knowledge and beliefs surrounding the educational applications of wearable technologies. The questionnaire contains a combination of short answer and Likert-scale questions, including background information about yourself and your teaching career/experience, your perceptions of wearable technologies, your ideas about use cases and potential avenues of future research.
The survey should take approximately 10 to 15 minutes to complete. You are in no way obliged to take part in this survey, but if you do you can go into a draw to win an iPad mini.
If you are interested or would like more information please follow the link below.
https://mqedu.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_cwsQOzPjSo4zAep
Many thanks to those who participate and if you have any colleagues who would be interested in this study then please forward this email on to them.
Best wishes,
Matt
Dr Matt Bower
School of Education
Rm C5A927 Macquarie University
NSW 2109 Australia
T: +61 2 98508626