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Month: March 2007

Total 21 Posts

The Release Day

By • March 16, 2007 • 17 Comments

I’m lost. I’m pretty sure I can get un-lost in time to present, but a proper sales pitch requires a certain degree of expertise that exceeds the parameters of this assignment.

I find myself craving 37Signal‘s mantra of Do Less Better. Check the beautiful minimalism of their front page and then check the clutter on Moodle‘s. Then again, 37Signals isn’t open source or built for outside development, so: apples and oranges. Still, I kinda prefer apples.

Anyway, at 08h00 I set into Elgg, Moodle, Joomla, and Drupal.

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Tech Adventure 2007

By • March 13, 2007 • 21 Comments

I’ve become shy in my use of the word “irony,” nowadays, what with the Grammarati so trigger happy in pointing out its misuse. So let’s just say that, as the word is commonly understood, my current situation is the very definition of ironic:

In less than a month, I’ll be making a case to the math department, then the leadership committee, and then the faculty for integrating 21st-century educational technology into our high school.

Ironic?

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LeaderTalk Leader Board

By • March 13, 2007 • 5 Comments

LeaderTalk has been knocking ’em out of the park lately. Brian Saxton writes compelling insecurity in “Is this what I have to look forward to?” Scott Elias gives an honest account of discipline from across the administrative divide. (Although his mandate to “Err on the side of the student” just makes me queasy.) And Greg Farr is far and away (heh) the byline I most anticipate on the board. He has a great recent post on the schizophrenic nature of the administrator, paying homage to statistics and AYP while staving off stat-insanity. Keep it up, gents and ladies, but could we puh-leeze get correct author credit in the RSS feed?

How To Assess

By • March 12, 2007 • 23 Comments

This is a math-related post. I’ve tried to keep it as broad-minded as possible because, as much as I believe I’ve found the best way to assess mathematics, I haven’t the foggiest how to translate it to other disciplines. And I need help.

(Prerequisite: It’s essential to assess math by concepts and skills rather than by chapters, for reasons I outlined here, but specifically in this case because assessing by concepts means I can remediate like a pro. A student comes in with a low overall grade in hand and I know exactly which of our (currently) 21 concepts are bringing her down. We tutor, we reassess, grades go up, comprehension goes up, everyone’s happy.)

Ranking a close second in importance to concept-based assessment is the selection of good concepts. Here’s where I almost went wrong this last week.

We’ve been assessing Cones (#19) for a couple weeks now. It’s a straightforward concept. All you need to find the surface area of a cone is the slant height (19 inches in the picture) and the radius of the circular base (7 inches).

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