Data Data Everywhere – Excel now available January 18, 2008
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Wow, what a difference one year makes. Seems like last year I couldn’t GIVE an Excel spreadsheet away and now I’ve got requests for data streaming in like crazy.
I blew the dust off of an old script I had and decided to give the people what they asked for…the ability to download your student performance data directly into Excel. Look for the little Excel icons on reports in SOLO, GradeSpeed, and GradeSpeedPlus in the near future…
by clicking on the icon, you can save your data into Excel for your own analytical use.
ETL 2007 Conference Presentation & Handout December 4, 2007
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I wanted to make my PPT presentation & handouts available.
Bad Blog hits the road December 3, 2007
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In getting ready for our district’s presentation at this year’s Educational Technology conference in Roanoke this week, I realized it’d be a good time to post…collecting my thoughts on the message I’m going to deliver.
When I submitted the presentation proposal back in September, we had just begun blogging with earnest in the district. I went out on a limb and pitched a proposal titled Bad Blog!!! Housetraining your blog for the K-12 classroom. (As a kid I always enjoyed writing the title of the literature paper well in advance of the actual paper itself).
Well, three months down the road I’m glad to say that the blog has been adopted and is now a lovable member of the SPS family. But why was it that I had my reservations taking the stray home? I Googled the words ‘fear of blogs blogosphere’ and came back with a lot of great thinking on what it is that’s driving the love/hate relationship behind the read/write web.
A great summation can be found here from M. Gotta about a possible double standard of organizational K-12 blog adoption.
The tone and emotion levels however get quite passionate however, when the topic of blogs comes up.There does seem to be agreement that public-facing blogs can have real business value from the perspective of marketing, PR, customer intimacy and community-outreach. That perspective however does not seem to transfer broadly when the conversation shifts to possible internal adoption of blogs.In fact, it is not uncommon to hear a range of opinions that could be represented by the following statements:
- Risk-related: “We’re afraid of what people will say.”
- Productivity-related: “We don’t want people wasting their time.”
- Performance-related: “We don’t see the business value.”
Although he was addressing business blogging, I felt that these three questions were essentially the same that I have been asked often and have been asking myself about organizational blogging in the K-12 classroom. I thought it made a great map for visualizing where each of our integration initiatives fits into the larger questions.
For each one of our milestones, salient points, ‘lessons-learned’ , or rules of thumb that I want to highlight, I began thinking about which question or questions it addressed.
I’d like to invite other K-12 bloggers out there to read M.Gotta’s article, then reflect on your experiences. Those key experiences, examples, moments that you’re thinking about…where do those fit into the diagram above? Do you have concrete answers? Do you have links, posts, axioms, rules that you can stuff into those Venn slivers?
Chateau Suffolk ‘07 – A good vintage? Winemakers influencing educators… June 20, 2007
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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11151829
Officials at schools in California’s wine country are hoping a new emphasis on data collection will help them pinpoint ways to improve student performance on state-mandated tests.
On the daily drive into work (yep…still saving up for satellite radio in the new car) I noticed NPR’s Morning Edition has begun a series focusing on school improvement. The story’s catch was that the schools were using large amounts of ongoing performance data to improve performance at some poor-performing schools in California’s wine-growing valley. Beyond the Sonoma ‘label’, I had a hard time making the analogous leap from pours to scores. But, feeling the same way about bad data decision making that Miles does about Merlot, I had to weigh in on this one and give it a blurb on the blog.
I found the story compelling not because the approach was that revolutionary or that the situation was very extraordinary (we’re doing the same horticultural practices in our vineyard and wrestling with similar challenges to bottling a better student). What I took note of was the enthusiasm and disappointment the teachers experienced with data &despairing student performance. Of course, I’m sure the comments NPR chose to air were well-crafted….but the sentiments that made it to the air echo in the hallways and inboxes of alot of people I talk with.
What’s the takeway from the story? A redeveloped student performance metric? Tasting notes at graduation? College admissions sommeliers doing career pairings. “Hmm…Engineering is pretty heavy and robust…maybe we’ll place you with something that balances your acidity…how about BioChemistry?”
Rapping Your Way Through Ge-O-Ma-Treee w/ TeacherTube May 17, 2007
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Here’s a little gem we stumbled upon here at the Technology Center…TeacherTube.
It’s just like YouTube, except it features educational videos rather than silly home movies of crazy cats and bad karaoke. You can post your own content or scan the site’s many channels. You can watch and download videos such as Technology Fear Factor, Make Classroom Posters with Microsoft Excel, Walkthroughs and Learning Objectives, and Mrs. Burk Perimeter Rap.
One of our favorite’s comes to us from Mrs. Burk, a math teacher who knows how to drop the beat as well as a fractional remainder…silly as it may be, look past the amateur production quality and get excited thinking about the possibilities for teachers with a little bit of creativity and know-how to get The Message out to the kids using TeacherTube.
Blog Monsters May 8, 2007
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Here’s a curious bunch of blog-ready characters
How to Create Your First Blog May 7, 2007
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Welcome to Wordpress. Wordpress is one of many different blogging tools that allows you to quickly post to the web. You can post text & image to your site, as well as provide lnks to other websites for your readers to follow.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on setting up your blog and creating your first post.
Let’s get started making your first blog – here’s a Quik-Start video to follow along with.
