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!

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!
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

Hello again,

I’ve been reflecting on some of the posts I’ve read since I first began participating with you here.  It seems we’re all in agreement that technology has really changed the face of teaching and how we assess our students’ progress.  There’s one glitch, however; where do we find the time to use our new tools and plan successful strategies for their use?

Although ThinkLink is easy to use and the probes are very helpful, there are teachers at every school who do not seem to be able to create the time to further explore the usefulness of these probes for their students. What ideas do some of you have to bring more teachers on board?

Okay gang………I am in the midst of my first DEN Summer Institute and WOW!We are in Sliver Spring this week and are in day 3. I have seen and learned so many amazing things thus far. If any of you are singed up to attend the other two institutes in FL and CA you are in for a real treat.

Anyone out there signed up to go??