Sunday, March 29, 2009

Dr Bob Marzano CUE 2009 Keynote Part II - Assessment

Dr Marzano speaks at the CUE 2009 Conference about his recent research on IWBs. On this second part he talks about assessment.
Please note that the discussion starts on minute 20 of the first video. See post on Part I of this keynote.



My notes

Part I Min 20

Formative assessment as an instructional tool
Feedback from classroom.
Assessment should provide students with a clear picture of their progress on learning goals and how they might improve.

Formative Assessment
Bangert-Drowns, Kulick, & Morgan 1991

Feedback on classroom assessment
Types

Right/Wrong
Provide Correct answers
Criteria understood by student vs. not understood
*Explain
*Student reassessed until correct

*higher gain


Part II
"Assessment should be a process of interaction between teacher and student. That is all it is."

Dialogue model
Students are able to say,
"This is what I see I have to get"
Teacher,
"This is what I see you have to learn"

"You can never rely on a single assessment no matter how good the assessment is"

Reliability
Decisions made about the individual, the class, the school, the district. To whom does the assessment make sense?

"You cannot rely on the 100 point scale"
Rigorous rubric-base approach.

Observed score= the score+error
(the student 'deserved' another score)

We need to look at a lot of data over time to assess. This is where technology comes into the picture. Keeping track. Grade books.

Min 7
Shows examples of students self-assessment.





Related links
Classroom Assessment & Grading that Work
By Robert Marzano
http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/106006/chapters/The_Case_for_Classroom_Assessment.aspx

Applying the Theory on Measurement of Change to Formative Classroom Assessment
By Robert Marzano
pdf
http://www.marzanoresearch.com/documents/ApplyingTheoryToFormativeAssess.pdf


Rubrics and Self-Assessment Project
http://www.pz.harvard.edu/Research/RubricSelf.htm
"The two studies that made up the Project Zero's research focused on the effect of instructional rubrics and rubric-referenced self-assessment on the development of 7th and 8th grade students' writing skills and their understandings of the qualities of good writing."

Assessment bookmarks on my delicious
http://delicious.com/fceblog/assessment






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Dr Bob Marzano CUE 2009 Keynote Part l - Educational Research

Dr Marzano speaks at the CUE 2009 Conference about his recent research on IWBs.

He addresses the question What do we know about the effect of technology on student achievement?

On this first part of the keynote, the discussion centres on educational research, its value, how to read results and some instructional implications.

The second part focuses on assessment. (on separate post).


Here my notes as I watch. My reflections at the end.

Min 8
Quotables on stats and findings
"If you line up all the studies what you will find is that on the average, it all works pretty weel, but there will always be a big chunk of studies that say it doesn't work."
"If you use it, you do it less well than if you don't use it."

What is the implication of that?
"All research is equivocal, particularly in education.
And here's why: you can never account for all the factors in the classroom that impinge upon the strategy, the technology, etc, etc. You cannot take the human being out of it. It's always going to be that way."

Good news
"We can have all these tools we can use, but none of them is a silver bullet."
You cannot use everything all of the time. The point is which set of tools bring the best results in my classroom.

"The more experience you have with technology, the more effectively you can integrate it to classroom use."

An expert user is not just someone who uses technology, but someone who reflects, re-thinks and relearns and then goes out again into his blog, forum or community.

An expert is someone who models how he learns, how he evaluates the tool and practices.

Slide
Sweep Spot
Conditions under which you obtained the projected highest increase in student achievement.
  • An experienced teacher
  • who has been using the technology for two years
  • who uses it about 75% of the time in class
  • who has had enough training to be confident in their use of the technology

This is linked with good teaching

"You can't just give the technology to teachers and expect to automatically enhance student achievement."

"Sometimes it is possible to get better results without the technology."

Professional development= technology+ instructional strategy
Q1 How do you modify an instructional strategy with the use of technology?
We only have guesses.

Proper use of technology includes
-Clue: keep focus on the content, not the bells and whistles
-Keep track which students are "getting it" and which are not

Min 18
Questions can work against you in the classroom
Strategies to increase response rate- Student involvement
Voting technology (not just taken at face value)

Min 22
Starts discussing assessment, which is dealt with in depth on the second part.

------------------

My reflections
(marginally relevant)

It is interesting to note that although expertise and time spent experimenting with the tools is an entry level requirement, these things cannot be taught in a particular sequence. Everyone of us in the edublogosphere is reaching out, finding what they have to say and trying to model. Yet, none of us is following or trying to figure out some grading to the acquisition of 21st century literacy. There will be guidelines; yet not unquestionable rules of best practices.

The informal learning we make is more like jumping into the deep end of the pool and then tweeting out for help. Someone in the network will throw us a lifesaver link with some resources to learn how to swim. You keep calm and confident you'll make it with a little help from your friends and your autonomous learning skills.

I note this here to remind myself when I prepare a presentation for people new to the eduverse who might take Dr Marzano's statement of expertise at face value.











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Saturday, February 21, 2009

Time to Resist

Time to Resist


From the chat conversation within the Elluminate session, Brian (link?) poses the problem:

Brian: What do you think is the best way to implement web 2.0 technology in a resistant school?

@jonbecker: @Brian - what are the reasons for resistance?

Brian: People feel that it is one more thing to learn.

Brian: They are afraid of the time committment


My thoughts:
How many potential adoption conversations start and stop there, I wonder. I remember the very first time I presented about blogging in front of my co-workers. One of them informally asked me at the end of the session:

This is wonderful, but how much time does all of this blogging take?

True. Lots of time.

Now we may argue we are Professional Learners. Therefore, we are paid for what we do, namely, learning and modelling it to colleagues and students. However, when you are awake at 4 am out of a need to be sharing synchronously with folks you have been reading and desperately nodding to asynchronously for so long, something sounds as if not every one will adopt our practices that much. There are life priorities. There is time to resist.

Perhaps not everyone should. I am still struggling to achieve sleep/network balance. Yet, I have no doubts what I have been doing and learning satisfies me beyond description and I would continue doing it even if I am not paid all of the extra time. Just do not tell my boss (recently befriended in my Facebook), ok?

Being online since 2006 has turned me into a pioneer in the eyes of my workmates. I am certainly not the best model on learning time admin. I just hope that in future, these learning conversations and reflection mode underpin the practice of teachers. I imagine a day when the line between the scheduled Professional Development session and the engaged informal conversation afterwords is blur.

Now tell me,
To what extent should teachers change their time/routines to catch up with edtech goodness? Where do you draw your own line?




Picture credit
http://www.flickr.com/photos/monkeyc/112342184/

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Thursday, September 18, 2008

Cn EdubloggerCon Chat

Cn EdubloggerCon Chat

It's simple. You check what's going on via Twitter and if you feel like learning you join the conversation. That's how I joined this one tonight. It started in a UStream channel by Jeff Utecht inspiring a lively conversation among some 20 followers, which ended up in a wiki that was read aloud to the the attendees. Full circle.

It's strange to think that so much learning and engagement goes on among people I've never met face to face. Of this online meet-up I've just met Chrissy last summer in Buenos Aires. Yet, we are all happy learning buddies. Somebody will have to explain to me someday why these conversations are not so probable in your own workplace staff room. There is something magic and attractive about talking to people far away in distance; however, very much synced with our minds. We are close.

I wanted to jot down some ideas that well deserve future posts. For this is the kind of conversation I really enjoy being a part of.

Chrissy Hellier and Julie Lindsay summarised the starting point in their tweets:
nzchrissynzchrissy Focus on the learning not the technology cerca de 2 horas ago from twhirl
Icon_star_full
Julie Lindsayjulielindsay Don't confuse the learning experience with the tool set...blogs, wikis, Moodle...what do these mean in terms of learning? Communication? cerca de 2 horas ago from web
Icon_star_full

I've read many similar tweets lately. I guess that at this moment in the edubloggers conversations I overhear on Twitter, we get a bit confused sometimes. We voice a need to underline the basics frequently.

Tech is the enabler; not the learning.
This line seems a cliché seen outside the context of the chat, but as we were discussing we realised how messy it all really is. The learning and the explaining what we have learnt is not that simple.

I think there is a value in publishing and exposing ourselves as people struggling to learn. We are not experts; we are curious learners. Not everything is a success in what we do, the old ways find their way into our classrooms. Yet, we keep motivated to go on because we understand the value of our efforts. And this is an important model to show our students. The bumpy road in which we all learn.

Other topics followed in the chat:
-Meanings of literacy
-How differently we learn today; being the protagonist of your learning.
-Modelling how we get caught up in the learning and try again.
-Students coaching teachers.

Fascinating conversation tonight with Bud, Jen, Steve and Patrick. I met (wish Ustream provided hyperlinked names!) mmkrill, kstevens, laurenogrady and many more passionate voices.

Thank you all. Look forward to a next time.

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Saturday, February 23, 2008

Conference Context: The 2.0 Way

Conference Context: The 2.0 Way
(Just live-blogging notes)
I am attending -well, sort of- Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation. These are some side-reflections while at the conference. These notes are personal and not necessarily tuned to the session content.

The first session is by Ben Wilkoff and he starts off by asking how to create context for students online. A context where they can express just-in-time reflections.

Probably because I am not a native speaker of English I find it hard to fully understand some audience members when they are not that close to a mike. But this is just a digression. What amazes me now is to what extent my own expectations of a context have changed. I do not feel anxious that I cannot fully understand everything being said, or take perfect notes, which I know I wasn't before. I do not even worry that I may have to cut a session short and go out before the shops close here in Buenos Aires.

Actually the meaning of attending has changed once we have shifted to an online environment. There is a wiki to gather every distributed venue for the events and to archive chats. I do not regard it as a place to recover everything I may have missed. The wiki is just a spot I will go to for reference, for the missing links to take my thoughts further.

Unless I blog about the conference and publish my thoughts -i.e open my mind to speak with others- what is the purpose of attending online events? For some, certificates of attendance would do. They make sense to many people. For me, I think the way of assessing my own learning would be to track the conversation generated by this post. Mind you, not the hits in Statcounter, but the thoughts triggered as from these.

So what is my conference context?
A tweet pulling me in
Bud Hunt budtheteacher Started. It's on. http://colearning.wikispace... about 5 hours ago from web


Another tweet guiding me within
David Warlick dwarlick In case anyone else is online, there's a Learning 2.0 conference going on in Colorado, Ustreamed at: http://tinyurl.com/2l2zee about 4 hours ago from twitterrific
Ben Wilkoff bhwilkoff Live Blogging Learning 2.0: http://tinyurl.com/2qsj9j


A chatroom with people I know (online only) and people I first meet or hear of. Yet, we have things in common: we are sharers and learners, perhaps, the voracious kind of reader who would spend part of their weekend on this event. Take that for likemindedness enough to lead to some success learning wise.

The wiki has a short and clear intro to the purpose of the event as well as several links on the side bar. Yet I chose to start my way in by a tweet. Why? Maybe I felt it was more real than reading a static guide. It was just-in-time.

Ben rounds up,
"How do we make our classroom more authentic?"
Perhaps not showcase this connectedness, but model and drag them into the conversation just-in-time.

And now -towards the end of the first session- I go on to read the post that started it all. I do not feel this is late to read it. Just-in-time. My learning time.

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Saturday, June 23, 2007

EduBloggerCon07

Tagging the Path for Communication

It's been a new experience. I've spent an afternoon at a twittering distance of the attendees at EduBloggerCon07, an unconference in Atlanta today. They are wrapping up the event as I write this post.

I have been "in touch" using a set of tools based on RSS and tags which I have learnt to use in the last year.
Wikispaces attendees list
Blog Posts
Flickr
Twitter

Actually the Conference Twitter spot was not that active as I had expected. It was Steve Dembo (see the happy twitterer face in the pic -pretty telling) who live blogged the event. Also Vicky, Chris and Jeff. At least from my Twitter contacts.


And from their tweets, I got the posts people in my RSS are making about the event with notes that help you to trace some of the landmarks of the conference.
............
Note to self: FOE-Things we need to definitely learn: Teach your students to be communicatively concise. Big plus today to know how to handle 140 characters.
.............

Vicky Davis has summed up some conclusions on the event in this post (please read, my numbers refer to her notes).
Some thoughts -
1. Database, yes. Now, those curricular needs would just be according to the system of one country? Could that be more generic and then let the network be more specific?

2.The tagging standards seem to point a country-specific database. It can be a good example for others to follow or improve.

Tagging- This is where I get stuck. I completely agree standards can help to access fast. My suggestion is to study first how beginners tend to tag. One of the advantages of tagging is its unique simplicity. Whatever tag we choose should not be too elaborate. At least if we aim at making beginners speed up in all this.

Here is an example of what I mean by generic tags, broad tags, which could create specific categories simply by adding them. It is a tagging plan for a literature resources wiki.

I have decided to use a non capitalization policy for tags there. However, I find that some people prefer capitalization when tagging their own names in del.icio.us, so when it comes to names, I still wonder what is best.

As regards the use of hyphens, I will use hyphens for words that carry one on print too (e.g. Post-colonialism). To avoid ambiguity, I think I'll use perhaps an underscore to join closely related labels if necessary. The idea is that the labels are clickable and point to related pages quickly, so I'd rather use single word labels. If I join tags with hyphens, I will be singling the page out far too much to join it to others.

In a nutshell, I think tags should be mashable. Not that I know exactly how to do that with a tool. But I'm sure someone in our network will know!

What can be unique to spot content is not the tag, but the combination of tags. Would that be better accomplished by joining with dots, underscores or the + sign del.icio.us uses?

3. Volunteer group to tag resources in del.icio.us. Choosing tags which have a seamless integration to those already in use by educators will be instrumental in obtaining a rich database. Tagging is a comfortable, easy action. It need not be "taught" or arbitrarily chosen for you. That sounds more like taxonomy than folksonomy to me.

I have collected a database of educators in del.icio.us by adding them to my network.
http://del.icio.us/network/fceblog

It has been my dream -a wild one indeed- to be able to navigate that network fast. I would like to ask a tool to retrieve information such as:
-Who is saving more items tagged ...?
-Who has been recently saving items on a specific topic?
Clicking on each of them is tough.

4. Simplicity and video tutorials. Who could doubt the power of these two put together?
I would add something else:Strands. I think that's where the efforts of volunteers should be best directed to.

Why?
The beginner blogging teachers I have generated here, after a presentation on blogs, have both - at different exploration stages- felt the need of a "blogging course". One of them wanted it at the early stage before getting RSS-ed. The other one has tried to do it to find order in her online journeys. Result: Disappointment. They were looking for tailor made things and what you need is tools to tailor make it yourself.

That is why I think the essence of whatever we create for them has to be more like the ingredients in the kitchen than the menu at the restaurant. The menu can have puzzling terms. A PLE is to be made individually and the needs of the elements to include or how many tools to use in it will vary far too much to plan.

But I digress from Vicky's original point. Just thinking out loud.

...........................................
Resources
(just sharing my little serendipitous research)
My PBwiki page on Del.icio.us
This includes video tutorials and slideshare ppt.

Practical aspects of tagging
Tagging Help for Teachers

A Bit of Reflection
A Cognitive Analysis of Tagging
A Social Analysis of Tagging
Thirteen Tips for Effective Tagging
Tags: Database Schemas
Folksonomies- Tidying up Tags?
Tag Literacy

Tag Searching Tools
Del.icio.us Tag Search
(If only we could limit this to as many users as we need).
Tag Search in Social Bookmarking Services
Flickr Related Tag Browser
Tag Browser
This is a tool to download. Need to explore yet.

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