To participate in the virtual sessions register at: links.DiscoveryEducation.com/Virtualcon.

For information about the 25 in-person events please visit: http://blog.discoveryeducation.com/virtcon09 .

More information

The 25 in-person events are taking place in sixteen states: AL, AR, AZ, CA, FL, IA, KS, LA, MD, ME, MI, MO, PA, TN, TX and WI.

The schedule for the virtual sessions is below.  All times ET.

9 AM
Can I Help You With That?  The Student as Collaborator, Creator and Director
with Justin Karkow

10 AM
Do You Have the Audacity to Podcast?

11 AM
Thinking Outside the Slide

12 PM
Putting the Bling in Your Builders
with Steve Dembo

1 PM
What on Earth is a Gloggle?

2 PM
Be Nice and Share: Publishing Your Media-Infused Projects for the World to See

3 PM
Can I Help You With That?  The Student as Collaborator, Creator and Director
encore presentation with Justin Karkow

One of the things I do as your friendly assessment nerd is train teachers on using the information from Discovery Education Assessment’s reports to improve instruction. I usually start by telling them places to get support and ways to join the community of folks who use Discovery Education. Well, a crew of fabulous technology coordinators in Collinsville. IL asked that I post links. So, FYI:

When you log on to Discovery Education, look on the right side of the screen for “My Services.”  Make sure you see Discovery Educator Network (DEN):

If you do not, go to http://community.discoveryeducation.com

From now on, when you log in, you’ll have a quick link to the DEN!

Now, here are some other places we discuss:

• http://www.twitter.com/den
• http://delicious.com/discoveryea
• http://www.facebook.com/discoveryeducationassessment

So, there’s some things to keep you busy for a while! Connect with us and let’s get to sharing

Your Friendly Assessment Nerd, Porter

This weekend, I visited one of my best friends in Springfield, IL. On Sunday before my return flight home, I decided to buy a magazine to entertain myself on my flight. Although I do read a lot about education, technology, and assessment, sometimes I like to read about things that are not work related. So, I bought the September 2009 issue of Family Circle.

On the cover, new slow cooker recipes, 45 ways to save $, and 40+ pages of “home sweet home” ideas are promised. There’s also a section on back to school. I don’t have any school-age children, so I wasn’t so excited about the style trends for kids as I was the great tech buys promised. Well, would you believe right smack in the middle of my magazine there is a four page article “Testing 123: Everything you need to know about SATs, ACTs, APs and more. Pencils down!”? I just can’t get away from assessment nerdery!

One of the things that I found interesting was the article points out that test-prep for these tests is important to help students become familiar with the directions and format. David Hawkins of the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) says that there are large studies that show that for the SAT most students’ score increase only about 30 points overall after test prep. For the ACT, he says a recent study showed scores increased about half a point after test prep. Here’s what I think is really interesting about these numbers… the increases are tiny! Why???? I know why! Testing for the sake of testing does not improve student performance. Without quality instruction on what is being tested, students just won’t make marked improvements. This applies to most anything, I think! We must assess with a purpose… to inform instruction. Then we must use those results to plan and adjust what we are doing. That’s when we’ll see increases in student performance.

On an unrelated note, I also learned in this magazine that eating a cup and a half of blueberries a day can reduce belly fat by up to 12%. I suppose that means by themselves and not in muffins. Oh well!

Your Friendly Assessment Nerd, Porter

One of the benefits of joining the DEN is that you get access to several Builder Tools that you can use with Discovery Education Streaming.

One of those tools that I’ve been playing with this week is Quiz Builder. Quiz Builder allows you to create quizzes that have multiple choice, short answer, and true/false type questions. The really cool thing is that you can add DEstreaming videos for the quiz as a whole and/or for individual items. You can also add videos that show up in the report when a student misses the question.

Check out this quiz I built on the human body.  Be sure to miss a few items for fun.

Until next time,
Your Friendly Assessment Nerd, Porter

I knew this was underway, but imagine my surprise when Education Week reported that drafts had been released this week!

Well, here they are for your viewing pleasure:
Preamble
Standards for Reading, Writing, and Communication
Mathematics

Check ‘em out. What do you think?

Your Friendly Assessment Nerd, Porter

A classmate in my Differentiating Instruction course shared a cool link today and I thought I’d pass it along to you.

Laura Cawley says,  using Jeopardy

“is a great way to prepare for a test or project, and get the students involved. It allows for several different categories, and the opportunity to work as individuals or groups. It is a very basic game, so not difficult to create. It also gives opportunity to be challenging.”

The website features a number of Jeopardy game boards that were created in PowerPoint by teachers and is organized by topic and grade. There is even a link at the bottom of the page to create your own!

EDIT: Thanks to Robin (see comment below) for another resource for making your own Jeopardy game at Jeopardy Labs.

So, have some fun reviewing for tests or quizzes with your students!

Your Friendly Assessment Nerd, Porter

If you’ve been around the DEN any at all, you’ve probably seen that Discovery Education and Wilkes University launched an online master’s degree program in instructional media last year. Well, not only am I an assessment nerd, I happen to be a bit of a geek (which explains why I am blogging!) So, I’ve been checking out some of the courses. This session, I am taking the course in assessment. For me, this is a fun course since I am getting to see classmates get excited about using formative assessment to drive instruction. I am also taking the course on differentiating instruction. (btw, I spell it differientiating  EVERY single time and spell checker saves me!) Now that I’ve confessed my inability to spell it, let me ask… do you know what differentiating instruction means?

In 2007, ISTE published Differentiating Instruction with Technology in K-5 Classrooms by Grace E. Smith and Stephanie Throne. I mention their names because not only did they write the textbook, but they also wrote the course and are teaching it this session! They explain in the text,

“Differentiated instruction focuses on teaching strategies that give diverse students multiple options for taking in and processing information, making sense of ideas, and expressing learning.”

Is it possible to give diverse students multiple options without assessment? I vote no. To differentiate by interest, teachers must assess student interest. This may be done through informal observations, interviews, or surveys. But, all of these are a type of assessment. In my experience as a special educator, I frequently used assessment to differentiate instruction by need. Typically, I’d use some sort of curriculum-based measure to determine students’ performance in reading fluency, comprehension, written expression, mathematics computation and reasoning. Using assessment tools, I was able to temporarily group students for specific lessons or units based on their needs. These freed up a lot of time and prevented a lot of behavior problems since students were working on appropriate assignments and frustration/boredom was minimized.

Using assessment tools, teachers can determine what students are interested in, their learning style, and what skills they need help on. This allows teachers to make decisions about what to teach and how to deliver the instruction to provide students the best opportunity to learn. That’s what differentiating instruction is all about!

Until next time!

Your Friendly Assessment Nerd, Porter

Do you Twitter?

I keep seeing a lot of tweets from educators new to Twitter that say something like, “I don’t get it.”

I’ve been twittering for a while and consider it the most important feature of my professional learning network (PLN). Twitter is the primary tool that I use to stay on top of things in the world of educational technology and media. It is where my PLN grows. I thought it might help if I included a few tips for those of you who are brand new to Twittering.

1. Some people use Twitter as a journal. I am frequently guilty of this. Although I want to use Twitter as a way to look back when I am older, this isn’t really how it is best used in education.

2. Some people use Twitter to share what they have learned or found. This is where Twitter becomes an amazing part of your own professional development.

You have to follow those #2 kinds people to get good info. Here are some users you should follow:
Steve Dembo
Principal’s Page
Lucy Gray
Vicki Davis
Lori Sheldon
Kathy Schrock
Education Week
Dan Callahan
Dianne Krause

These folks often times post links to blogs or just random cool tools.

The best thing about Twitter is that you don’t have to read everything. It’s not like email. Browse through and keep going if you’re too busy.

Do you have a Personal Learning Network (PLN)?  Has anybody else found anyone cool to follow? I’ve been looking for folks who Twitter about assessment. If you find any, please share!

Your Friendly Assessment Nerd,

Porter

I hear teachers talk a lot about a lack of time, so I’m always looking for short cuts to share. So, here are 4 cool tools to use to save time at figuring out what your students know and can do.

1. Rubistar is a free online rubric builder. You select the topic and dimensions and Rubistar does the rest. You can save them on Rubistar, or copy and paste into a document to keep for later.
2. EasyTestMaker is a free online test generator to help you create your tests. You can create multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, matching, short answer and true and false questions all on the same test. You can also insert instructions and divide your test into multiple sections.
3. iQuiz Maker is an easy way for you to create custom quizzes for the iQuiz game for the iPod. (Yes, for iPods!)
4. Discovery Education™ Quiz Builder allows you to incorporate video clips into interactive quizzes.You probably need to belong to the Discovery Educator Network for access, but membership is free and it will connect you with loads of other teachers… so go ahead sign up and tell ‘em you read about it on the Assessment blog.

Anybody have any experience with any of these you’d like to share? Please add that to the comments. I’ll be adding new tools in future posts, so if you have an idea be sure to share it.

Your Friendly Assessment Nerd,

Porter