On March 4 and 5, 2010, I attended the Northwest Council for Computer Education (NCCE) conference in Seattle.
Here are all the sessions I attended, my thoughts, and all the related resources I can find.
Dennis Small, CBAs for Washington’s EdTech Standards
I was interested in attending this because it was on assessment of standards. Standards tend to get a bad rap, and so does assessment, especially when it’s of standards. My analytical and organized instructional design soul cries out at these attacks. How can anyone say having standards is bad? How can anyone say assessing whether standards have been met is bad? You can say the standards are poorly written, poorly implement, poorly designed. You can say the assessment is poorly designed and unimaginative. But just because these things are so often done badly does not mean they, themselves, are bad. Standards are how you know what the goal is. Assessment is how you know you got there. Simple. Essential.
Anyway, I’ll tuck aside my little soapbox and write about the session.
Dennis Small is the Director of Educational Technology at OSPI (Washington State’s Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction). Tara Richerson actually did most of the presentation. First they discussed timelines and deadlines for when assessment of the standards would need to be developed. All of that sort of information is better accessed from OSPI than from my blog 
so I won’t go into it here.
I learned that 13 states assess educational technology literacy. Some assess it online, and only four assess it by embedding in content tests. Those four are the only ones that have it right, I think. Technology is nothing without content. No one uses technology that’s worth having standards written about it and assessing a person’s skills at using it just for the sake of using the technology. They use it to learn and to create. The best assessment is an authentic one, so embedding technology assessment into content assessments gives a chance of it being authentic.
The attendees were shown a tech standard and then given time to discuss how they would assess it. I chatted with a technology integrator who shared that his school’s problem was not how to assess technology, but rather that they were still discussing whether they should use it. My previous post has my impassioned response to that nonsense.
After the discussion, teachers shared some formative assessment techniques:
- When one student has a tech question, instead of answering, the teacher asks another student to answer.
- In a web design class, students blog their daily progress in a web design class.
Tara shared a quote that I love: “Give me enough evidence to convict you of learning.” I believe she cited a source, but I’m not finding it in a Google search.
I took a couple more notes via Twitter:
- Does there need to be an audience of the information that you organize–how do students prove they can organize ideas?
- How do we make the evaluation consistent from teacher to teacher and content to content. Evaluate “creative.”
One person’s definition of “organization” and “creativity” can be vastly different from another’s. The point of an assessment, though, is that any work will receive that same evaluation regardless of who is examining the evidence. The challenge is to design an assessment that effectively asks the learner to organized and creative, and that gives the viewer enough evidence to convict them of that. I find that exciting.
Keynote
The keynote was the same one I attended at FETC–a talk about the state of our environment from Philippe Cousteau. He’s awesome, amazing, and engaging, but is in no way what I expect for a keynote at an educational technology conference. I understand the economic reasons for the choice, but please, put someone up there to inspire teachers to integrate technology. His message is vitally important, but there are a lot of vitally important messages, and the one most relevant to an educational technology conference is the one on effective technology integration. /rant
Jennifer Gingerich, Digital Kits for Differentiation and Learning
Jennifer Gingerich is a technology coach for an Oregon school district. She shared a story about her transition from physical, topic-specific learning kits to digital ones. She used to collect materials on different topics that kids could handle and pass around in order to become familiar with the topics. When digital resources became available, she had a revelation that her kits could be digital and this is how she came to embrace technology (at least that’s how I remember it now, two weeks later). She shared that she wanted to help other teachers embrace this and had a tough time until she finally gave in and just gave them one to use. Then the teachers saw how great it was and asked how to make their own.
Some tips she shared were to create a folder structure in which no two folders have the same name. For example, at the top level, there would be folders for “Ocean” and “Oregon Trail”. Inside those, there would be folders for pictures, but they would not be called “Pictures”. They should be called “Ocean Pictures” and “Oregon Trail Pictures”. Having worked in a one-to-one computing situation before, this made total sense to me. When you’re trying to explain to 25 or 30 people to go to a particular folder, and you’re trying to walk around to make sure no one is lost, it’s so much easier if the window’s title bar has the full name of the folder. In Windows there are options to turn on the full path, but you’re not always in control of that setting, so it’s better to name the folders something that will quickly tell you that Lucy can’t find the picture of the flower because she’s in “Fish Pictures” instead of “Flower Pictures”.
She was an engaging and informative presenter, but I could not stay for the whole thing as there were many more presentations I wanted to see. Her website includes many more resources on this and other topics.
Randy Orwin, ePortfolios Using Open Source Software Called Mahara
At the district I used to work for, I got to participate in many conversations about the practicality and challenges of implementing ePortfolios. At first blush, they probably seem like a no-brainer to implement, but given a little time to think about legal and technical issues, they’re really quite complicated and easy to do very very wrong.
Mahara sounded pretty cool. Jason Neiffer liveblogged the session.
My Twitter notes:
- The portfolio is exportable and then viewable as a web page. The portfolio can travel with kids who leave the district.
- Also usable as a digital dropbox.
- Students can create views of their art that displays the sizes etc that they want.
- A teacher could assign making a view of their work for a specific purpose. The work exists once and can be used in many views.
- The student has complete control of what is published and who can see it.
- I recommend looking at Mahara of you are considering digital portfolios and want to allow your students a sense of ownership.
I’m not sure that I have much more than that to share. In summary, I was impressed and would really like to see this in the wild someday.
Okay, that’s all I can write tonight! And I decided that if that’s all I can write in one sitting, it’s probably more than you want to read in one sitting! So I’ll post more as I have time to write it. And oh, is there more!
