XplanaZine

Here’s a summary of ideas and conversations from the edublogging community that have captured our attention in the past 48 hours.Alan Levine shares this link to Alisa Cooper’s wiki for her workshop “What Can You So with a WIki?” This is a wonderful example of how to model technology for training.

Tom Hoffman takes a look at essay writing on high stakes tests. He discusses the need to make up information and sources. His recap of the post is:

• “high stakes” assessments of non-fiction writing have to allow students to make up facts;
• people who don’t know what they’re talking about find this disturbing;
• so teachers are supposed to ignore this;
• even though it is harmless;
• and would raise test scores.

In other NCLB news, the NY Times featured an article Sunday on the “narrowing of the curriculum due to NCLB requirements. Narrowing of the curriculum or of the general American mind?

In a similar vein David Jakes talks about Digital Story Telling and its real value to students and teachers. He argues that the skills required to create digital stories are often greater than those required to meet testing standards.

Lanny Arvan has put together a couple of posts on faculty development . In this latest article, he talks about a kind of on-the-job training and mentoring role where mentoring and learning takes place at the real point of need — in the classroom.

Wesley Fryer had a great post on how blogs are changing education and Tim Stahmer took up the discussion of Britannica vs. Wikipedia with a new twist. He argues that initial accuracy is less an issue than the ability to fix errors in general and to record new information quickly. If that is the standard, Wikipedia will win hands down.

Finally, David Warlick writes about learning as doing — “learning is about doing, regardless of your learning style. It means doing it. Doing to it. And doing with it.” Amen. And now back to some doing so I can learn yet a bit more.