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What one thing will most revolutionize education?

Replied Sep 18

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Hometown:: Huntington Beach, CA

School / Work Affiliation: St. Paul the Apostle School

About Me:: I am a teacher-librarian for a K-8 Catholic school in Los Angeles, CA. I love exploring 21st century education paradigms, using technology, and working with educators to create learning environments that integrate the two.

Website:: http://www.mswitten.wikispaces.com

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At 10:22am on October 7, 2008, David Kapuler said…: You might find this site useful for beginner readers, http://tarheelreader.org/

At 12:03pm on September 18, 2008, Ian Grove-Stephensen said…: > I am right in assuming the administrative set up is extensive initially

What??? Do you think we are monsters?

Seriously, it's very easy. If you have your kids' names in a spreadsheet, just paste it in and off you go. Very few teaches put their whole school on up-front. People put classes on as they need them. We designed the system to support ad-hoc adoption; even if two teachers wind up putting the same students on twice, the system will soon sort it out. We figured that if we want to empower classroom-level teachers, we must keep every decision within their remit.

> as teachers ...create/find assessments,

The search tools need work, but they are not bad. You can usually find suitable assessments quite quickly if they are there. Creating new content is more work, although quite often you can just pick up and modify something that is there already. Sometimes you will find that if you start a new authoring project, other people will find it and join in, so in general you don't have to do all the work yourself. Unless you want to - some authors prefer to work in isolation and we try to support that too.

At 11:34am on September 18, 2008, David Kapuler said…: We have a filter, but being one of the tech's if there is a site I need unblocked I just email to our lead tech who is running the filter server, that is all you should have to do, email the person in charge of that, the site you want unblocked.

At 11:15am on September 18, 2008, Ian Grove-Stephensen said…: Thanks for the comment, Leslie. I love all these new toys we have, but... it's the people who will make a difference.

> tell me about yacapapa...what kind of assessment? I'm interested...

It starts from the observation that teachers waste a phenomenal amount of time setting and marking assessments (up to 30% of their time, depending on definitions). I'm strongly in favor of the idea that if you measure learning frequently and accurately, you can improve your teaching. The question is how to do it efficiently, so teachers can spend their time teaching, not grading.

Enter Yacapaca. It is a productivity tool for teachers. A suite of assessment types from simple multiple-choice through short-text assignments to sophisticated ePortfolios. Where we can automark, we do. Where we can't, we look for other ways to make grading faster and more accurate. At all points we try to make assessment formative.

Assessments are written by our teacher members; over 1,000 teachers are now authoring assessment materials of one kind or another. About half choose to make those public and share them with other teachers. The majority of our users are in the UK, so there is a strong bias towards British content, but some of the best-quality assessments are actually coming from our American authors. They seem to grok the model faster than most Brits.

Yacapaca is a work in progress. We are coming up towards the one million member mark, but that's out of approx. 1Bn people in formal education, so we've really only just started. And there are so many more ways to assess students, that we have yet to support.

Leslie, feel free to come and try it with some of your own students. Here's the Yacapaca Home Page; the service is completely free, and a warm welcome from our community is guaranteed.

And thanks for your interest!

Ian

At 7:52am on September 18, 2008, David Kapuler said…: Yea, embedding would work, or u could white list the site, or you can go the sneaky route, and surf through a proxy, but I don't recommend that, don't want anybody to get in trouble.

At 5:47am on September 17, 2008, David Kapuler said…: I don't where I keep finding these, but this appears to the best video search engine around, u have to register (free) to use it. http://www.videosurf.com/

At 1:42pm on September 13, 2008, David Kapuler said…: Lesie, just came across this site which is great for video, it looks similar to teachertube, hopefully you can find some use for it. http://studio4learning.tv/

At 8:52pm on September 7, 2008, Shavon Davis-Louis said…: It is very sad that so many educators can't see the many advantages of technology and web 2.0. Education is always the last to see the need for change...the business world should be our example/guide - because aren't we suppose to be preparing our students for the work place :-)

I am working on a "spotlight" page and it will include student examples. There are a few examples there now but as I go through old files I'll add more. I will also ask teachers around school and hopefully send you more sites soon. Check my site soon for those projects.

You can email me at ShavonLouis@gmail.com. I check that more often than classroom 2.0. Again good luck and I can't wait to hear more from you and your colleagues.

At 4:28pm on September 6, 2008, Shavon Davis-Louis said…: Thank you for the lovely comments. You are welcome to share my site with your colleagues. I am hoping to have more student examples available on my site soon. Because of size and space each year I have to remove the previous years student work. Keep in touch and I'll share examples as they become available. Good luck.

Shavon

At 8:42am on August 12, 2008, David Kapuler said…: This might be your solution for video in your school you may want to look into Safari Montage, http://www.safarimontage.com/. I'm hearing a lot about it from other districts that use it to house/mix video.

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