The DEAN’s List

The Discovery Educator Network (DEN) is a global community of educators passionate about teaching, sharing resources, collaborating, and networking. With over 125,000 members providing professional development to over 600,000 educators worldwide, the DEN connects teachers both on-line and in-person. Discovery Educators have exclusive access to a wide range of resources, professional development activities, networking opportunities, exclusive Discovery Educator events and more!

We invite you to join this amazing group of educators, and take this professional development opportunity to become a STAR Discovery Educator! Here’s what DEN STARs have to say:

“The Discovery Educator Network has great resources and tools that are accessible to teachers. These resources and tools help engage students in their learning. Being a DEN member and having these resources at my fingertips made me motivated to share what I learn to colleagues. The more colleagues that become Stars, more sharing occurs and ultimately more students are engaged across the country.”
Sarah Thompson, Cut Knife, Saskatchewan, Canada

“Becoming a DEN STAR extended my horizons and provided me with many opportunities to expand my bag of tools for teaching and learning. Being an active participant of the community allows me to collaborate more effectively with colleagues and to take advantage of many training opportunities offered by Discovery Education such as Summer Institutes.”
Denise Steedle, Camden, New Jersey, USA

We are looking to grow the DEN STARs assessment community! How do you become a DEN STAR? It’s easy!

Don’t miss out on these benefits:

• Your own personal DEN blog
• The ability to search, download, and upload resources via the DEN Educator Resources library p owered by Discovery Education MediaShare
• Invitations to exclusive Discovery events
• The opportunity to apply to attend the DEN Summer Institute
• Materials for your training events

If you don’t know about the ongoing Back to School Webinars we’re hosting, check them out!  Today at 1pm EST we began the  Discovery Education Assessment series that highlights all of the exciting upgrades for the 10-11 school year.  We’ve been collecting your suggestions and comments and can’t wait to show you the new features and enhancements to the site- like the makeover to Progress Zone!

This series will be offered twice a day on August 11th, 18th, and 25th (all Wednesdays).  Click on the registration link to choose any of these webinars.  Please share with your colleagues, staff, and teachers.

We look forward to seeing you on one or more of these webinars and thank you again for continuing to make our site better every day!

Last week Discovery Education partnered with East Aurora School District in Illinois to host the first ever Assessment focused Day of Discovery.  This exciting and interactive day of professional development highlighted creative ways to meet students’ needs through on-going assessments and targeted instruction.  The event attracted over 100 educators with diverse backgrounds from the greater Chicago area to participate in the professional development sessions.

Donna Neblett kicked off the day with her keynote entitled “Roadmap for Effective Instruction”.  The message was clear and relevant to all involved as Donna compared the need to use formative assessment data to drive instruction with the need to use a GPS system to find your way to a destination.  “We start with the end in mind” (referencing statewide standardized testing), Donna exclaimed as she depicted the same way a driver would plug in the final destination into the GPS.  As Donna walked participants through the various aspects of Discovery’s balanced assessment solution, attendees awakened to the possibilities of using assessment data to save time and effort throughout their instructional day in the same way a GPS gives turn-by-turn directions to save time without getting lost.

Participants had their choice of sessions including developing a better understanding of benchmark reporting features, evaluating the RTI Progress Monitoring tool and how the entire DEA solution can be implemented within an RTI system, building an understanding of Progress Zone and other digital “Checking for Understanding” tools, and seeing how these tools can be implemented and complemented with digital media in a 21^st century classroom.

The results are in, participant feedback has been provided, and the final tally marks this day up as one of huge success!  Educators left the day having a better understanding of formative assessment, having built a common language around assessment, and understanding how to utilize the variety of assessment tools that Discovery Education has to offer.

As Mary Carr exclaimed, “I look forward to future professional development with Discovery Education.  WOW!”

You probably know about the ongoing DE Streaming Sneak Peek Webinar series that Matt posted on the National Blog last week.  Well here is your chance to catch up on similar upgrades to Discovery Education Assessment!  We’ve been collecting your suggestions and comments and can’t wait to show you the new features and enhancements to the site.

Sticking with a familiar format, we will be highlighting the new back-to-school material, as well as the enhancements that already live within DE Assessment today - like the ability to create/add your own items in Progress Zone.

This series will be offered twice a day on June 9th, 16th, and 23rd (all Wednesdays).  Click on the registration link to choose any of these webinars.  Please share with your colleagues, staff, and member teachers.

We look forward to seeing you on one or more of these webinars and thank you again for continuing to make our site better every day!

Tomorrow is the first of April, sometimes known as April Fool’s Day. In honor of the day, this test-stress alleviation tip is to host a joke-telling session. After a big test, an activity you might do is encourage your students to find jokes to share (and cite them properly.) You might also give students the time and guidance to create some jokes and share them. This creative writing opportunity could be a great stress reliever.

One of the simplest most inclusive activities you can do with students of all ages that can relieve stress is host a good old-fashioned show and tell. Ask students to bring in an item that they care about and share a story about it. For a 21st century spin, grab a digital still or video camera and capture great stories from your students. They could also create digital stories themselves with the item they bring in… wouldn’t that be fun and creative?

I asked a number of colleagues to help me come up with some ideas for this series of blog posts. One of the retired teachers looked at me matter of factly and said, “you want a relaxing activity for kids after testing? Let them have their handhelds back.” The rest of the group laughed and agreed that would certainly be a stress reliever for the students. I’m sure many readers will have barriers to implementing this tip, but for those of you who can make it happen, here are some links to cool activities to do with cell phones in school:

A list from Steve Dembo’s blog

Six Things from Lindsay Clanfield

Texting Lesson Plan from Amy Bowllan

After testing, consider setting up several centers for board games to be played. One of my family’s favorite games is actually a math game. Shut the Box can help students build fluency with addition facts and fact families. It is also fun for all ages! (My elderly parents play it to keep their minds young.)

If your students want more of a challenge, consider having them create their own board games. This could make a really good start for a project-based learning activity too.

When it comes to state-wide testing, sometimes teachers will need to rearrange desks from a group type setting to rows of desks or some other situation. Not only are desks rearranged, but the schedule of the day changes. One of my esteemed colleagues suggests that teachers make necessary changes several days before testing so that students aren’t thrown off during testing. Offering students the opportunity to become acclimated to the environment and schedule can alleviate some of the test related stress.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lnx/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Sometimes teachers plan to share movies with their students after some sort of summative evaluation. I remember being able to watch a movie based on a book as a reward for completing a unit on it, how about you? I loved that, even though now it seems a little odd to me that it was used as a culminating reward instead of an integral part of the unit of study. Anyway, students LOVE watching videos in class. Did you know that there are over 1 million fans of the facebook page “we’re watching a video today” “YESS!” “Here’s your question sheet” “UGH!”? How’s that for kids telling us what they find engaging???

This is a perfect time to share LIFE with your students if you have DEstreaming plus. Even if you don’t, there’s no time like the present to share Planet Earth with your students. It’s available in DEstreaming.