As I said in my previous post, using student's test scores on standardized tests is an ineffective way to evaluate teachers. If you want more on why it's ineffective try Joanne Barkan's op-ed in TruthOut. She also does a great job of explaining a few of the other big challenges facing public education these days.
I argued in that last post that evaluating the work of both teachers and students will be easier when that work is done electronically, at least recorded electronically, most likely on the web using some kind of cloud implement. If you want to see an example of what that might look like, check out either of the Bring Your Own Technology Webinars done by Classlink about its LaunchPad service. Cloud computing will enable school districts to get out of the business of supplying computers for learning, a business at which most school districts are very bad, and it will enable students and teachers to use the tools the rest of the planet is already using to communicate and create.
Moodleshare, where I posted the teaching and learning unit on Bird Observation, is one of the many new repositories of learning content that can be managed via cloud computing tools. The fact that learning content will soon be mostly in the cloud, or at least off the shelf, is fostering a whole host of various ways to create, deliver, and manage teaching and learning content.
I like Moodleshare for lots of reasons beyond the fact that they paid me to be part of the ARRA grant to produce Moodle units. Other reasons would be: they're right here in Minnesota, they're some really smart people doing the work there, and they focus on Moodle, the teaching and learning tool I've been using for the last four years. Jon Fila, one of the masterminds of Moodleshare recently reported that "Between Late-August 2010 and Mid-June 2011,there were 180,606 page views from 55,662 unique visitors. These visitors were from 179 different countries/territories. 39,000 of which were from the United States. Of the U.S. visits, 6,255 of them were from Minnesota. Two of the top three courses accessed on MoodleShare were from the grant uploads." It would seem that I'm not alone in liking Moodleshare.
Now, you might be saying, "yeah, but the units on Moodleshare will require lots of time and work by teachers and students and people to do the evaluating of the teaching and learning before we know if they're any good." Aha, you've just hit on one of the best kept secrets about education - it takes a lot of time and work, and it's complicated, but it's all very doable, especially with the corps of teachers we've already got in classrooms. Some of it is rocket science; some of it is just plain science. A lot of it is about reading and writing. And, in case you haven't seen an iPad, or T-Mobile, or Kindle commercial lately, reading and writing is now being done electronically on a whole bunch of different kind of devices that access the web or the cloud.
The valued added measures,VAMs, being touted everywhere these days are certainly a small incremental improvement over the old ways of 'measuring' teaching and learning. But they're still just resorting the same numbers that were generated in the same way they've always been. Defining and evaluating teaching and learning in this 21st Century can't be done by simply downloading sets of numbers that were generated by students filling in bubbles on either screens or pieces of paper. That will take us down a path that will get us to about the same place that the NCLB has gotten us; we'll still just be looking at the final score as it's printed in the next days paper. In order to actually see the 'game' of teaching and learning, or better yet, participate, we'll need to use the literacy and measuring tools that are concurrent with the world in which we live.
Some of the new organizations with great ideas that I think can make a difference in teaching and learning and evaluating teaching and learning are:
Betterlesson.org
Sophia
Socrative
Grovo
The next post will be a more in depth look at how those tools will make a difference.
And, I'm always open to new suggestions...
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