Does Moodle Support the Technology Enhanced Items for Assessment in the Common Core

Does Moodle's LMS support the seven new technology enhancements to  Common Core tests?

One user of Moodle (Plymouth University, UK) says that these types of questions are available in Moodle: (Links go to Moodle documentation)

• Calculated question
• Simple calculated
• Calculated Multiple choice
• Drag and drop into text
• Drag and drop markers
• Drag and drop onto image
• Drag and drop matching
• Embedded answers (Cloze)
• Essay
• Matching
• Multiple choice (MCQ)
• Numerical
• OU Multiple response
• Random short answer matching
• Select missing words
• Short answer
• True/false

What are the technology enhancements to  Common Core tests from PARC and Smarter Balance.  Edudemic has a good article which reviews

1. Drag and Drop: This item type does exactly what the name implies. Students need to drag an item from one part of the screen to another. IS it click, drag, click to drop?

2. Multiple Select: This item type is most similar to a traditional standardized test format. It is a multiple choice question, but instead of just one correct answer, there are many, and students must choose all of them to get the question correct.

3.Text Selection/Highlighting: This item type requires students to click on words, phrases, or entire sentences as a way to answer questions about specific parts of a text.

4. Equation Builder: This item is like a mini word processor that includes specialized mathematical symbols, ranging from simple division signs to more complex trigonometric symbols, such as sin and cosine. WILL THIS SHOW UP ON LANGUAGE ARTS TESTS?

5. Drop Down Menus: This item type includes a menu that expands when clicked on. From the expanded menu, students can see possible answer choices. They click on the word or number that completes the answer, based on context.

6.Constructed Response: This item is an embedded word processor. It has simple word processing functionality, like the ability to change text size and style and to cut, copy and paste.

7. Multiple Part Question: This item is not a new item type; rather it is a new way of organizing items. The Multiple Part Question asks related, tiered questions using a combination of other enhanced item types.

The new generation of advanced standards, mostly the Common Core, has a new generation of tests, mostly from Smarter Balance and PARC. There are of course the Texas and Florida versions of the standards and a few others.

The FL standards are different than the Common Core standards in a number of truly insignificant ones. But, by Governor Dick Scott demanding that Florida not use the Common Core, he becomes a hero to some people on the right. He also  forces all the teachers and educators in FL to spend millions of hours trying to slightly rejiggle all those great common core materials into something they can use to support their work by doing a crosswalk of the national materials to their local needs.

Who are the big technology education companies with the expertise that I need:

Moodlerooms
Classroom Revolution
Webanywhere

TED talks - my favorites

Alice Goffman: How we're priming some kids for college — and others for prison

Dame Stephanie Shirley - Why ambitious women have flat heads

Anand Giridharadas: A tale of two Americas....

Not as good...
Cameron Russell: Looks aren't everything. Believe me, I'm a model.

Dillard Elementary School

One of the things that I like best about my job (I run an edtech company) is that I feel that I have a front row seat to history. I'm watching and participating in a historic review and shift of the American educational system. Long considered the best in the world, we have been trying to recreate it and it's very interesting.

Last year, I got very involved in helping Dillard, a local elementary school. Basically, it's a school with a tough challenge. With a 100% of their students qualifying for free or reduced lunch, the probability is that it should be an F school just like all the other Broward elementary schools with that demographic.

But Dillard Elementary School, led by Principal Angela Brown, is defying the odds. She's in her third year of leading the school with a determined and innovative approach. Last year, it counted as a C school and if it hadn't been for her 5th graders (who had only been with her for 2 years), she would have had an even better rating. How does she do it?

Well, it's a very interesting story.  Here's a few pictures of what her classrooms look like. Notice how different they are from conventional views of a classroom?

There's a lot more to the story of her approach.  For instance, she believes that the weekly lesson planning for the following week should start with the standards. That's right, she has each group of teachers take the time to have a close reading of the standards that they are supposed to cover the next week.  She doesn't start with curriculm and she doesn't have lead teachers explain the standards to others.

The teachers collaboratively read and try to unpack the standards breaking them into four Depths of Knowledge

She also expects her teachers, after having analyzed the standards, to come up with three new ways to teach them which are essentially kinesthetic and collaborative and which address each of the different levels of Depth of Knowledge.

Oddly, she has been there three years and her staff, who was initially very very resistant to her ideas, has become a big fan. She has had very low turnover. It's a huge school, over 800 elementary students.

As you would expect, Angela Brown won Principal of the Year for Broward County!

Symbaloo in Elementary Education

Symbaloo's popularity is really amazing, it's done great in education. 

Teachers and students in elementary school love it.

They put webmixes on webpages, desktops, and in newsletters.

Here's how it works. You create collections of weblinks which is a webmix. Each weblink is a tile. Once you've created one, others can use it. Or you can use others. Here's a collection by grade level.   Enjoy. And pass them on...

Kindergarten free educational resources
1st Grade free educational resources
2nd Grade free educational resources
3rd grade free educational resources
4th grade free educational resources
5th grade free educational resources
Elementary Science
Vocabulary Spelling Games

Adaptive learning - Am I the Only Skeptic?

I've been working in edtech for over a decade and I have heard vendors talk about personalize learning paths, individualized learning, and adaptive learning for the entire period.

I have services that support millions of K12 students. So far:

- I AM a believer in student paced. Students should be able to proceed through digital content at their own pace.  I am a believer in letting students repeat lessons and exercises when they want to.

- I am NOT a believer in any of the adaptive learning systems that I've seen.

Why?

Here's an anecdote but it's from a major player. They visited us a month ago and were pitching their adaptive learning platform.  At the heart of the pitch, they had a slide up with a student entering an antonym exercise and various paths coming out. It sounded good. He spoke well. He was the senior product director.

I asked: "So what would be an example of an antonym question?" His example was was a standard multiple choice question such as, 'Which of these is the best antonym for "hot"?'   A. Warm, B. Cold C. Cooking  D. Ice.

I asked, and if they get it wrong, where does that take them, what would be an easier question that would scaffold them into that question.  No answer other than, well, this might not be the best example. I was polite and didn't really insist on hearing a good example.

I just watched a video about MetaCog. It belongs to Victory and it provides a much better link between recommendation engines (Knewton, Dreambox, Area9, Declara) and content. Rather than use the simple data of right/wrong and time on task, it gathers much more data by gathering data of how they do things online.

It assumes that interactive learning activities and assessments can be instrumented to get more info on how the student behaved. Then, Metacog's platform aggregates, analyzes, and recommends along with visualization tools for the teacher to understand.

Here's again the weakpoint, what content actually allows such data to be gathered?

I do see the mechanisms behind many adaptive elearning platforms and they all seem to make simplifying assumptions about content such as:

a. Vocabulary can be sequenced, easy to hard. All of it.
b. Grammar can be sequences,    easy to hard. All of it.

More later....

How Do We Teach US History: Myths or History

In Oklahoma, there's a brouhaha over whether the AP US History exam should be banned because it's not respectful enough of US History.

More broadly, there's decades of battles of how we should tell the story of US history in K12. Is it a collection of inspirational stories to make us proud?  Is it a stab at teaching the real complexity of history of our peoples so today's students have a real inkling of how things came to be the way they are?

I'm by coincidence, reading two books that directly relate to this debate. I'll circle back to the references at the end.

Let me start by pointing out that in Russia, the history books are written as a way to justify their current policies and politics. History is an extension of their propaganda policy which is part of the control system used to deceive, confuse, and manipulate the public.

 I'm pleased to live in the USA, land of the free, home of the brave. I am proud of our history but not of all of it.



 As an American, I expect the history books to tell real history, not Russian-style propaganda myths. We are a free country with a proud but blemished history. Lets not further tarnish ourselves by not being frank about what's happened.

The two books that I'm reading:

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev.  It's an amusing book told in the first person by a Brit who worked inside the new Russia.

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen.  This is the second version of an analysis of high school American textbooks and how they tell a version of US history that has to be totally unlearned by students who study history at the college level.  He covers the changes since the first version of his book came out.

Teaching history is part of the crazy culture wars in this country.  Here's one example from the book. Most of us were brought up on cowboy movies which tell one history of the frontier.  

 It doesn't tell say that the frontier was much like the Berlin Wall, meant to keep people from escaping to the freedom of living with the Native Americans. The slaves were trying to escape to freedom. Many free blacks were also trying to escape the racist European society. And, many Europeans wanted to go live with the Native Americans but according to many colonial and then state laws, it was illegal. This is an untold but real history of much of our frontier.

Information Text: Golden Books & Common Core

The Common Core makes a big point that students should become better readers not just of literature but also of informational text. It seems that students, as they look for work, are generally not hired to read stories with plots, themes, characters, foreshadow, and other literary devices.  They are hired to work on non-fictional issues and so they need to be able to read articles about the real world. For instance, in the last week, I've had people read articles about new trends in search engine algorithms, social media marketing platforms, technologies, and markets.

This sort of reading is about informational texts and it's considered to be a very modern idea.  Many of the people who oppose things, like conservatives and high school English teachers, seem to feel that this is a bad change.

I myself was brought up in my early years on Little Golden Books.   This back cover of a Golden Book is the one used on informational text, not a story.  I've tried to find out what percent of hte books were informational versus story and so far, no answer.

I did discover that the Pokey Little Puppy was by far the best selling Golden Book of all time. I remember it well. In fact, I had the record of it and I remember it very well.