School as a Conference, Update

So, I’m just getting to making some sense of the evaluations of our “Who Owns History?” conference. The first thing I did was just average (or rather tell the spread sheet to average for me) the rating for the day (1-5 scale). The average was 4.4. I’d say that’s a pretty good start. So, the [...]

It’s all Fun and Games

So, I’ve been thinking about what do on the day before spring break when there will be a few too many people absent to do something new and a few too many people present to just do fluff all day. I planned my formal assessments for the day before the last day since I actually [...]

Essay v. Podcast, Round 2

So, I’ve been thinking about the essays I assign 5th graders. (To give you some idea of what to expect from 5th graders, at the beginning of the year many of them think “essay” is “SA”.) I’ve also been thinking about the podcasts we’ve been doing this year. If this were a title fight, who [...]

Thinking about assessment (old post)

(post from my old blog Feb 7, 2010) Last year I started using a classroom blog, mostly devoted to language arts. By the end of the year there were 1,701 comments. Most of those comments were part of assignments, and I therefore thought they might need some sort of assessing. Even when I was wearing [...]