The DEAN’s List

On Saturday, October 24, 2009 join thousands of educators online and in-person as the DEN team goes house to house to explore the many digital treats available to educators today.  You can attend virtually from the comfort of your home or in-person at one of the many events hosted by the DEN Leadership Councils.

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

Greetings Blogosphere!

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

Greetings, Blogosphere!

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

Greetings Blogosphere!

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

Greetings Blogosphere!

It’s Your Friendly Assessment Nerd, Porter reporting live from Discovery headquarters in Silver Spring, MD. I am here with  60 of the 225 members (from 34 states) of the DENLC. This is my first time interacting with these folks, so this is how they were described to me before coming here. “Porter, there are DEN members, and there are DEN Stars, then there are the members of the LC. These folks are the SUPER STARS!” I’m not sure who told me that; I think I heard it more than once… Well, it’s true!!!

There are many users of Discovery Education Assessment (DEA) out there, and we are just beginning to integrate with the DEN. Seeing the collaboration here really excites me on behalf of those teachers using  DEA who will become active in the DEN. (That’s what the DEAN’s List really is about, connecting our Assessment family to the DEN family.)

As a primer for those of us new to the DEN, here’s some info that I’ve learned about what being a DEN member, DEN Star, and DENLC means:

DEN Member: Anyone who registers and is active on http://community.discoveryeducation.com/ is considered a DEN Member. As a member of the DEN, you’ll get access to free resources and can read and comment on the blogs (like this one!) This will connect you to the 125,000+ other members of the DEN!

DEN Star: DEN Members who are interested in sharing their knowledge about Discovery Education services with coworkers can get additional access (like their own blog and the ability to upload files for sharing) and support by applying to be a DEN Star. There’s a new video that provides more info. I’ll add it here when it is finalized.

DENLC: Members of the DENLC are DEN Stars that have been elected to represent their state. These are extremely active members of the DEN. They plan and support events in their state and have an active voice in shaping the DEN. Here’s some information about the DENLC.

DENLC Members and DEN Stars, if you’re reading this… please feel free to add more info in the coments about the commitment involved and the benefits. What are the best parts about being a DEN Member?

Greetings Blogoshphere!

This afternoon (Monday) I’ll be hosting a webinar that provides an overview of Discovery Education Assessment’s Predictive Benchmarks. If any of you are available at 1pm EDT and are interested, here’s some information:

Match, predict and improve student performance on state exams with Discovery Education Assessment: Predictive Benchmark. A powerful formative assessment resource, Predictive Benchmark generates a clear, accurate picture of every student’s progress toward state-mandated educational goals. This webinar will provide you with an overview of Predictive Benchmark, an incredible resource that has been shown to predict performance on state exams with up to 90% accuracy.

Follow this link to register: https://discoveryed.webex.com/discoveryed/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=556448329

If you can’t attend this session, I do these at least once a month

Porter, Your Friendly Assessment Nerd

Greetings Blogoshere! It’s your friendly assessment nerd, Porter here to remind you that Earth Day is next week!

Discovery Education and Waste Management have partnered to create www.ThinkGreen.com/classroom . This new suite of tools is designed for educators seeking new materials to enliven environmental lessons.   www.ThinkGreen.com/classroom provides K-12 standards-based lesson plans, videos, interactives, quizzes, tools, and hands-on activities related to the environment.

If you’re planning to think green in your classroom for Earth Day, visit www.DiscoveryEducation.com/thinkgreen to get started.  Plus, while supplies last, if you provide feedback you’ll receive a complimentary reusable tote bag!

Greetings, Blogosphere!
I am Porter Palmer, the manager of alternate assessment projects at Discovery Education Assessment and technology fanatic extraordinaire! I have been given this wonderful opportunity to share some things on our assessment blog, and could not be more excited.

So, this is a blog devoted to assessment and my very first post isn’t exactly about assessment. Hopefully y’all won’t mind too much. This is indirectly related to assessment. One of the features of Discovery Education Assessment’s products is our Resources area. Once you’re logged in, the navigation bar looks similar to this:

When you click on Resources, there are links to URLs for your state’s standards, goals, performance indicators, skills, or whatever term your state uses for the chunks of stuff they expect students to learn.

I am sure that y’all know that new instructional resources are creeping up on the Internet all the time. We have also been expanding our grades and subjects, so we are in the process of linking URLs to skills. To make our job easier internally, we created a delicious site to share bookmarks of websites that had either links to sites with instructional materials or a large quantity of instructional materials. For those of you already familiar with delicious, here’s the link: http://delicious.com/discoveryea.  For those who don’t have experience with it, delicious is a social bookmarking site, one of those handy web2.0 tools. You can store, share, and discover web bookmarks on delicious.

What started as an idea to assist those of us who are charged with the laborious but extremely fun job of surfing the net for great instructional websites, turned into something I thought we should share.

I wonder if you have some ideas of how you might effectively use delicious in your classroom, school, district, etc. to collaborate. If you do, share them here.  If you find any of our bookmarks extremely helpful, share that too! Tell your stories so others might learn.

If you have a delicious account, add us to your network. If you don’t have a delicious account, you can still use our page as a portal to instructional materials. (Disclaimer: I can’t promise that all the links on the bookmarked pages are free or that they don’t require a membership for some content. I can promise that I tried really hard to make sure the sites are free and don’t require memberships!)

Until next time!
Your friendly assessment nerd, Porter

“Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you did not do than by the things you did do. So, throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” Mark Twain

Congratulations, Discovery Education Assessment, on being selected as one of the top software products of the year.  These choices were made by actual users of the products, by people who have discovered what we are living every day: the more we know about  how are students are learning, the better our instruction be tailored to meet their needs.  To read the report, go to http://www.districtadministration.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=1474&p=3#0.

Laurie

Now that the testing season is over and many are out of school, what are your plans for the summer? Any one attending the Summer Institutes for DEN? I will be in Silver Springs on June 17.