Jul

26

Beyond Standardising Testing

July 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment

assessment-overview-video

This video explores the tensions between standardised testing and performance-based learning and advocates a move to “high-quality, localised assessment”. Project examples include students building robots, designing future schools and racing electric cars. The Urban Academy in New York City, which is part of a consortium of 32 schools, has replaced standardised testing with performance assessment [...]

Jul

15

The bad news about the news

July 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment

This TED Talks by Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, demonstrates visually the warped world view presented by US network television, where Anna Nicole Smith and Britney dwarf all international news except Iraq.

The map above represents the seconds dedicated to news stories by country in February 2007, a month when North Korea announced plans [...]

Jul

10

“Crikey”: language and cultural identity

July 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment

It’s interesting how language reflects our sense of cultural identity and this is evident in the Scottish Voice project, which makes a high-quality, synthetic Scottish voice available free to Scottish schools. The project website states that: “We believe there is a strong cultural and educational imperative for pupils in Scotland to be able to read [...]

Jul

10

Searchme visual search

July 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Listed in Time’s 50 Best Websites of 2008, Searchme is an “engine that displays results not in the usual text-list format (that’s so Google), but as a slick image gallery of actual Web pages you can flip through and filter results by topic.” Below is a search of “Ken Robinson”.

addthis_url [...]

Jul

10

Literacy resources

July 10, 2008 | 1 Comment

Border Literacy Resources is a British site that “aims to help teachers by drawing together and categorising many of the free Literacy teaching and learning resources on the web.”
There is a whole range of different resources on here including: prose, reading for information, poetry, drama, creative writing, genre and grammar.

addthis_url [...]

Jul

10

It takes years to be good…

July 10, 2008 | 3 Comments

This video from Ira Glass, radio host of USA’s This American Life on National Public Radio, provides pertinent advice for those of us, teachers and students, who are trying (and failing) to create quality media products.
Glass’ advice is that it takes years before you can produce work that is where you want it to be [...]