Daily Archives: 10/26/2005

NSBA: Educational Cathedrals

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Educational Cathedrals and Flying Machines with Michael Jay, Educational Systemics

This talk is about how we adapt the educational environment to meet the needs of our students in an environment of rapid technological change. What’s an educational cathedral? It includes the physical design and the resources we use. The structure dictates the kinds of learning that take place in important ways. The presenter is talking about instructional, technological, and pedagogical implications of the educational environment.

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NSBA: Roundtable on accessible Web sites

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I got to facilitate a roundtable discussion on accessible Web design today. The lack of an Internet connection in the room prevented us from showing some live sites, but I promised to post some links here. I showed a bit of my presentation on the topic from last year’s TIES conference. There are a number of useful links on that presentation—which was built using Eric Meyer’s S5 system—including some book recommendations. One that isn’t there is for Eric Meyer on CSS, an excellent project-based book on the subject. Designing With Web Standards by Zeldman is also excellent.

We ended up discussing content management systems a fair bit and their usefullness for building standards-compliant, manageable, and accessible sites. There are a number of education-specific content management systems exhibiting here in the vendor hall, and I recommended some other open source options including Plone, Drupal, and Joomla! (formerly Mambo). My previous post on the topic might be useful too. Readers interested in accessible Web design, and universal design more broadly, might be interested in my recent podcast with Earle Harrison which touched on many Web issues.

We also talked about the challenges associated with using parent or student volunteers as Web site builders and the time crunch that school Webmasters often feel. No magic bullets, unfortunately, but I think most walked away with something new to chew on.

If anyone from the session has any questions or feedback, feel free to post a comment.

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NSBA: Evaluating Digital Products

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Evaluating Digital Products: Raising the Bar For Student Achievement, Bernajean Porter, BJP Consulting

We watched an example of a student-produced film about the bombing of Hiroshima and discussed how we would assess it. It was difficult to say since we weren’t the ones that gave the assignment, but it got the conversation started. Our speaker said that in many cases a scoring guide (i.e., rubric) isn’t even provided, or the scoring guide focuses exclusively on the mechanics of the product (e.g., number of images, number of PowerPoint slides). Too often, she says, the product is simply turned in without the kind of serious assessment that we usually give to more traditional writing assignments. I’ve observed this over the years as well, and have often felt like technological glitz has been substituted for high quality content. This is especially common with teachers who may not be very technosavvy themselves and may be more likely to be overly impressed with the polish that modern ditial tools can impart without any effort on the part of the student.

The speaker is against the idea of teachers creating their own rubrics, preferring instead to have teachers work in teams to develop common rubrics. Consistent standards will help students who have multiple teachers.

Porter’s book, Evaluating Digital Products, has lots of examples of scoring guides for 14 different types of assignments. Her Website, DigiTales, has a series of forms that teachers can use to create custom rubrics to guide the students’ work. She stresses that no technology should be used until the scripts and storyboards are conferenced and the content is solid. She believes that students should be encouraged to connect the content they’re presenting to their own context in a way that answers the “so what?” question.

This was a great session. It validated a lot of things that I’ve observed over the years. It may sound counter-intuitive, but I think we need to get the technology out of the assessment of digital projects. It’s not about the tech, it’s about the learning. I will definitely be starting a conversation about these issues with teachers back home.