Professional site of Sylvia Libow Martinez
Here’s a great resource for K-12 STEM classes – free open courses from MIT specially selected for high school.
Free Online MIT Course Materials for High School | MIT OpenCourseWare.
Highlights for High School features MIT OpenCourseWare materials that are most useful for high school students and teachers.
Next week is the New York State education technology conference NYSCATE in Rochester, NY November 21-23, 2010. I’m looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones, either at the Generation YES booth (#809) or maybe at Dinosaur BBQ.
If you are going to NYSCATE, be sure to check out these sessions:
Sunday November 21, 2010 12:30PM Highland JK (RCC) – Sylvia Martinez
You hear it everywhere. Games are the “future” of education. After all, kids love games, so if we could just sneak some education into them kids would magically learn! Right? Or is it more complicated than that? Let’s explore this together and find out where hype, hope, and reality meet.
Monday November 22, 2010 10:45AM Highland AB (RCC) – Panel
What does instant communication and global collaboration associated with Web 2.0 mean for education? How can schools approach Web 2.0 without fear, hype or hyperbole? What does it mean to be an educated person in 2010 and beyond, and how can our schools approach this challenge? We’ll extend our conversation from last year, and challenge you to think about the power of connective technologies.
Moderator: David Jakes; with Sylvia Martinez, Ryan Bretag, Chris Craft and Brian C. Smith
Tuesday, November 23, 2010 8:45AM Cascade CD (RCC)
All New York districts are being asked to report the percentage of students who are technology literate. This session will present a model of using authentic projects to build a technology literacy program in any school, even if there is no technology class for all students.
Presenters – Rachel Gregg; Technology Integration Specialist, Hamilton-Fulton-Montgomery BOCES ; Cindy Sengenberger; & NYSSTL Advisor, Science Teacher, Broadalbin-Perth Middle School; Megan Coker; ELA & SS teachers, South Glens Falls School District
This session will explore the third year outcomes of the NYSSTL program (New York State Student Technology Leaders). In more than 50 middle schools in New York, this innovative model for student-centered technology is showing that students can be 21st century leaders and show what they know through technology projects. The session will showcase video by teachers who are working side by side with these student leaders.
After that, it’s off to New York City for a family/friends Thanksgiving, and a JETS game Thanksgiving night.
Sylvia
Education Week: Expert Issues Warning on Formative-Assessment Uses.
Education Week has an excellent (and short!) article about how formative assessment is not a well-understood concept. I seem to be hearing the words “formative assessment” with greater frequency, perhaps moving into the “buzzword” category. But what does it really mean?
“Margaret Heritage, the assistant director for professional development at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing, or CRESST, at the University of California, Los Angeles, appeared on a panel here last week to discuss a new paper intended as a reminder of what formative assessment should be.”
“Referring to a body of work that sought to define formative assessment during the past two decades, including the influential 1998 article, “Inside the Black Box,” by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam, she said formative assessment is not a series of quizzes or a “more frequent, finer-grained” interim assessment, but a continuous process embedded in adults’ teaching and students’ learning.” (emphasis mine)
Lately, I’ve been hearing summative assessment as if it means “the test at the end” and formative assessment is testing leading up to that. This is clearly not the case. Take a trip around vendor booths at any educational conference and you will see that formative assessment is being sold as mini-quizzes that are supposed to give the teacher “feedback” about how the student is doing so “adjustments” can be made before the final test. This is a terrible corruption of the meaning of formative assessment and strips it of its power.
“Teachers use formative assessment to guide instruction when they clearly define what students should know, periodically gauge their understanding, and give them descriptive feedback—not simply a test score or a grade—to help them reach those goals, Ms. Heritage said. Students engage in the process by understanding how their work must evolve and developing self-assessment and peer-assessment strategies to help them get there, she said.”
Turning formative assessment into more little tests is a deceit aimed at selling more testing products and making them easier to invent, administer and catalog.
To do formative assessment, teachers have to talk to students and look at student work. They have to have a relationship with the student so that the feedback is meaningful and useful. With good professional development and a supportive school culture, teachers can learn to do formative assessment. It doesn’t take more time to do it right.
What takes time is testing that focuses on catching students at what they DON’T know for the purpose of collecting more data points. Those gaps in understanding could have been caught in the context of learning. Missing those teachable moments is a lost opportunity that can’t be regained.
“Ms. Heritage’s comments echo others’ concerns that the meaning of formative assessment has been hijacked as the standards movement has pressed states into large-scale testing systems. The result, Ms. Heritage said, is a “paradigm of measurement” instead of one of learning.”
“A teacher quoted at the end of Ms. Heritage’s paper captures the essence of the paradigm shift Ms. Heritage has in mind.
“I used to do a lot of explaining, but now I do a lot of questioning,” said the teacher. “I used to do a lot of talking, but now I do a lot of listening. I used to think about teaching the curriculum, but now I think about teaching the student.””
Doing real formative assessment is not impossible, and shouldn’t be dismissed as “too difficult” or “too expensive.”
What’s really expensive is to do cheap things that don’t work, waste time, and discourage student/teacher relationships.
Sylvia
Last week I was interviewed by Ihor Charischak for Math 2.0, a weekly webinar about math education and how it’s evolving (or not, as the case may be!) Ihor is an old friend and we framed the conversation using the stages of my own career and how math fit in. I’ve been a math geek, an electrical engineer and programmer in aerospace, a game designer and producer (educational and regular games), a parent, and now work with schools evangelizing a more student-centered, technology enhanced way to learn. All these experiences have shaped what I know and how I feel about math education.
I’m shocked at the trend that sees math as an endless series of skills, diced smaller and smaller into unrecognizable (but seemingly testable) nonsense. It’s a problem that many people only see arithmetic as math. I see too much vocabulary and not enough comprehension. I’m at a loss to understand why math is continually portrayed as not creative.
I’m becoming even more sure that we are doing damage to students when we teach them to narrowly find answers quickly and “the right way.” In the name of helping students “be confident with math skills” I think we are unwittingly teaching students to be less sure of themselves. I’m afraid that this math-phobia will have disastrous long-term consequences for students and society.
But like I said to Ihor, I can’t make any other choice than to be positive about the future of math education and work to expand and explain alternatives. This is where the kids are!
Ihor says in his blog CLIME Connections: Math 2.0 Linchpin Interview: Takeaways, “I had a fun time talking about the trials, tribulations and hopes for the future of math education with Sylvia Martinez last night.” I agree, it was fun, and we could have gone on for hours!
You can listen to the recorded session here. (This will launch the full Elluminate session with the recording, whiteboard, and chat window. Your browser may ask for permission to launch something!)
Sylvia
A prevalent view of education is that young people are empty vessels and schools simply open up their heads and pour in knowledge. Unfortunately this is a vision of education that is not serving us well in the 21st century. For a few students, this clearly works, but for many, this is a futile effort — made worse by an increasing focus on testing a few subjects at the expense of high-interest subjects like art and music.
By looking at students as objects to be changed, we lose many opportunities for students to be agents of change. Our society needs change agents — people who care about others, citizens, voters, creative imaginers and leaders. Where will they come from if we don’t allow young people to explore these roles?
Bullying prevention is an opportunity to engage youth in becoming change agents for an important cause, one that impacts them directly. However, lecturing them about rules or organizing pep rallies for kindness misses the mark.
To truly engage youth in bullying prevention, we must take the risk of turning some of the power over to them and allow them to be part of the solution. For example, some students can create their own presentations about bullying or participate in peer mediation. Students listen to other students much more about these subjects than adults, and identify information from peers as more truthful. Involving youth in solutions where they DO something important allows adults to steer youth towards the right answers and good behavior, instead of just lecturing. As adults and youth work together, learning and teaching merge, and youth find new empathy for others.
This kind of engagement requires long-term commitments and caring adults with talent in youth development. However, it pays off when youth develop real skills, compassion, and responsibility.
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Next week I’ll be in Seattle presenting as part of a day-long pre-conference panel on Youth Risk Online: Issues and Solutions at the International Bullying Prevention Association (IBPA) November 15-17 in Seattle, Washington. I was asked to contribute 300 words to a handout for the participants and thought I’d share them here too!
Sylvia
Sometimes it takes a crisis to bring about change, but if people are smart, they learn from OTHER people’s trials-by-fire and do something about it before it happens to them.
Remember Lower Merion School District and their laptop spying case? Laptop cameras were activated and photos taken (over 50,000 it turns out!) of students without permission, compromising privacy, and probably illegal. National headlines for the district to deal with, investigations, lawsuits and more. What was meant to be a way to track stolen laptops turned into a legal and PR nightmare for the community.
That was February 2010. What’s happened since?
Tech & Learning magazine thinks there is a silver lining to all this — and they may just be right. Especially if others learn the lesson. (by Andrew Page – Watch It!)
If there is a silver lining for this school district, which has incurred more than a million dollars in legal fees and countless hours of extra work, it may be that just as the advanced use of technology put it on the front lines of privacy issues, the same technology has proved itself a remarkable ally in connecting the district with its parents and students, who rallied around the shared mission to provide the most up to-date learning tools and environment. Whether it was Facebook groups or electronic petitions, Web sites or video broadcasts of public meetings, the solutions to the many challenges to the district’s use of technology came, in part, through technology itself.
In May, the same school at which the laptop-spying scandal broke, Harriton High, was the setting for the first meeting of a brand-new technology advisory council, a group of parents, students, and administrators who have volunteered to meet and discuss subjects raised by the district’s progressive embrace of technology for learning. Sixty volunteers attended the first meeting, which ran for three hours, and discussed everything from policy development to the overall strategy of using technology in the classroom. A special subcommittee on privacy and security was formed and had its first meeting in July.
IS director Frazier was there.
“One thing that has emerged from all this is that IT leadership is no longer hiding in the wiring closet,” he says. “IT leadership has to also think about it in terms of communicating with the students and parents, and how you can add value and decision making.”
from Watch It! Lessons learned from Lower Merion’s “Webcamgate”
So – what about YOU? What will it take to get IT out of the wiring closet and start building community consensus with parents, teachers, administrators and STUDENTS!
This article continues with links to new policies, roles, resources, and new plans for keeping the technology vision moving forward at Lower Merion. Why not take advantage of their hard-won (and expensive) knowledge!
Sylvia
Next week I’ll be in Seattle presenting as part of a day-long pre-conference panel on Youth Risk Online: Issues and Solutions at the International Bullying Prevention Association (IBPA) November 15-17 in Seattle, Washington. This is a in-depth look at a topic that’s both timely and important for everyone, not just technology using educators.
Last week I posted the details and the list of participants (I’m totally honored to be in this nationally known all-star lineup!).
If you are in the Seattle area, this is a must-attend event for anyone involved with school technology. The issue is timely and the answers aren’t simple. There is no “one size fits all” solution for building the solid policies and practices that reduce risk and expand opportunities for students in the 21st century.
Please consider attending – and if you do, say hi!
Sylvia
Anne Collier and Larry Magid of Connect Safely.org have released a timely new booklet, A Parents’ Guide to Facebook. This link will take you to a site where you can not only freely download the PDF booklet, but also an interactive at-a-glance chart with recommendations for how teens should configure their privacy settings with links to the pages on Facebook where they can actually change those settings.
It’s designed to help you understand what Facebook is and how to use it safely. With it, you will be better informed and able to communicate with young Facebook users in your life more effectively. That’s important because 1) if something goes wrong, we want our children to come to us and 2) as the Internet becomes increasingly social and mobile, a parent’s guidance and support are ever more key to young people’s well-being in social media and technology.
If you are a teacher teaching Internet Safety, it’s important to get parents on your side – the side of safe and knowledgeable use. Sharing this kind of information proactively with parents BEFORE a crisis is crucial.
Besides this new Parents’ Guide to Facebook, Connect Safely provides other excellent information about youth, social media, and how to stay safe using (not banning) the Internet in homes and schools.
Last week I had the opportunity to be interviewed by Steve Hargadon for his Future of Education web event series. It was a great conversation (Steve is an amazing interviewer!)
We touched on a wide variety of subjects, including: “myths” of technology integration, student voice, gender issues in technology, technology literacy and of course, education reform.
Link to replay interview (when you click this, it will launch Elluminate and replay the entire event, chat window and all.)
Be sure to check out the upcoming events in “The Future of Education” series – there is something for every interest!
Sylvia
