Friday, January 11, 2008

Winter Class Ideas

As in the past I was hoping to offer an tech class for Ashland credit this winter. When it is cold and gray outside what better way to spend it than with your teacher friends learning how to use new technologies?!

I have been thinking of making the core of the class related to data driven instruction. We certainly hear the term "data driven" thrown around a lot. But how can you use it to make your teaching more powerful? Right now have access to some data such as the OAT results, WrAP results, QRA results....but those are all somewhat summative in nature and not frequent enough to impact your day to day lessons.

I would like to have a class in which teachers learn how (and have time to do so) to create shorter assessments that can analyzed on a shorter term basis so they impact instruction much sooner and frequently than our QRA. How can objectively know our instructional strategies are working if we don't stop to measure and then track change over time?

Of course, I am always willing to entertain other ideas for this class which brings me to this posting. Do you have ideas of what you think a winter tech oriented class should cover? I look forward to hearing your ideas.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think this is a great idea. It would give us the opportunity to create something useful that could immediately impact our teaching. Even though I already have some of these assessments in place, it would be great to work with other teachers and get their ideas. Most of my assessments are taken from the "Collections" anthology, but I would love to have the chance to develop some other assessments using literature books. If enough people were interested, we could do some serious work for our grade levels, and earn credit for it!