There is no commitment on behalf of district leaders at all, it is very easy just follow three easy steps…

1. sign up online

2. assemble your team

3. review and respond to a series of questions

4. receive a custom report that provides an overview of your responses along a continuum of growth.

Metiri has always been known for creating useful tools that can help schools advance their efforts in 21st Century learning. The District self-assessment that is being provided by Project 24 is a continuation of those efforts. Within the self-assessment you will also find rubrics for each of the seven areas including – professional learning, budget and resources, curriculum and instruction, use of time, technology and infrastructure, data and assessment, and academic supports.

Learn more about Digital Learning Day

Learn more about Project 24

Learn more about the P24 District Self-Assessment

Take the P24 District Assessment Now!

As school districts begin to address these skills within the curriculum, they immediately recognize the need to assess their students’ progress. A very common way to to gauge performance progress of students on a myriad of skills, processes, and habits of mind is the use of rubrics. To that end, Metiri Group provides, in a newly updated publication, sets of continua for each of the skills. It is important to note that these continua are in fact, continua – not rubrics. They depict levels of development, but are not specifically targeted to any one task, assignment, content area or grade level.

Educators who engage with this new publication will find the continua to be an excellent starting point for the development of rubrics customized for their students, curricula, classrooms, and units of study. Metiri Group spent several years conducting the background research necessary to develop the initial continua released in 2003 and have continued to updated our research base over the past decade. Our intent continues to be, to provide teachers with explicit criteria by which to gauge students’ progress. Each continuum defines the skill; identifies specific behavioral, cognitive, and affective qualities of each 21st century skill; describes levels of progress toward each of these qualities; and positions each skill in the context of today’s digital society.

We are excited to bring you this new release and hope you find the continua helpful to your work. If you have any questions about how to access our 2013 21st Century Skills Continua publication please contact us at learning@metiri.com

Personalization of Learning: Models and Directions for Districts to Get Started

Personalization of learning is the next frontier. Come explore personalization through digital learning, exciting uses of Web 2.0 and apps, open educational resources, curated digital content, blended learning, adaptive learning, and ubiquitous access. Take a look at some great examples that are emerging through the implementation of the Common Core, analyze the learner experience, and outcomes, think about what it takes to provide that for your students, and then act.

Creativity and Innovation: Keeping it Alive in K-12

Do schools inhibit creativity in students? Can we nurture and promote creativity in students? If so, what does it look like in a 3-year-old? In a grade 4, 7, or 10 student? And how do you measure it? What are some tips and techniques for promoting it, and where’s the fit with the Common Core, new models of blended, online, personalized, and digital learning? Come join the discussion about the “secret sauce” for promoting creativity in today’s K-12 classroom.

]]> http://metiri.com/fetc-is-around-the-corner-and-cheryl-lemke-will-be-there/feed/ 0 http://metiri.com/did-you-know-that-metiri-can-support-your-one-to-one-initiative/ http://metiri.com/did-you-know-that-metiri-can-support-your-one-to-one-initiative/#comments Sat, 20 Oct 2012 16:26:46 +0000 Metiri News http://metiri.com/?p=933 Continue Reading]]> In 2002, Metiri was selected by Apple computer to provide consultation and guidance to the Henrico County Schools as they rolled out the first large-scale, one-to-one initiative in the nation. Laptops were provided to tens of thousands of students over a three-year period. Since that time, Metiri has served as a thought leader in effective deployment of one-to-one laptop, tablet, and even cell phone initiatives. The purpose of these initiatives is to connect rich, authentic curriculum design, with serious science related to leveraging these devices, to promote student engagement and self-regulated learning behaviors. Metiri has had long-term relationships with individual school districts and private companies internationally, with clients such as Apple, Microsoft, and Intel. Metiri has provided the development of white papers and online courses on effective use of laptops and mobile devices; and training and support to ensure that a one-to-one program adds documentable value to students’ school experience.

Read more about what we do to support you in designing, facilitating, and measuring the impact of your one-to-one initiative…

Metiri’s Cheryl Lemke will be serving on the panel for education and workforce development along side Karen Cator (Director of Educational Technology, U.S. Dept. of Education). The panel will focus on modeling and simulation in K-16 education, and focus on the following…

With the marked advances in computational speed and memory of modern computers which are generally available to large numbers of people at acceptable cost, modeling and simulation is starting to appear in the lexicon of educational programs ranging from Kindergarten through post-secondary educational programs. Innovation is based on the understanding of the physical systems provided through mathematical models and how those models operate over time. A workforce proficient in modeling and simulation is required to further increase the efficiency and profitability of US industries. 

o Challenges associated with infusing modeling and simulation (M&S) into primary, secondary and post-secondary curricula

o Solutions associated with infusing M&S into the above curricula. Solutions that could be modeled in other organizations and/or regions

In one of the previous projects we did for Intel, an online course on engaging students in a one to one environment, we worked with programmers in Egypt. In this current project, we are working with developers in Ireland. This morning the app developer in Ireland emailed me looking for some missing links; html that had been lost in the Word doc to text translation. I pulled up the original doc, copied out the links and sent them, and he responded with thanks; all in real time despite the fact that it is 8:30 AM here and 4:30 PM there. This reminded me of one the first experiences that I had with the Internet.
I was technology director for a state intermediate school agency in Lake County, IL in the late 80’s/early 90’s. One of our superintendents in a small elementary district had been to a science conference and had been given a login and email address to the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET, and early precursor of the Internet. At the time, of course, there was no World Wide Web and you used a variety of protocols to access fileservers, messaging boards, and, of course, email.

At any rate Wayne, the superintendent got me hooked up with an account and I brought a modem (remember those?) home with me for the weekend to try it out. I was using TelNet, an early network connection protocol, to gain access to some articles stored on a hard drive in Scandinavia, Denmark I think, when it suddenly struck me that by pressing keys in my living room in McHenry, Illinois, I was making a hard drive whir in Scandinavia! This absolutely amazed me and I literally spent hours that weekend poking around hard drives all over the US and Europe. (That seemed to be all that was connected at the time.) It truly gave me my first solid lesson in a shrinking planet.

I can remember a similar experience the first time I opened a Web browser and used a search engine to search the World Wide Web. While I was amazed at all the information out there, I can remember doing a search for “American Indian Tribes” and coming up with NOTHING! Still, the fact that I could view images and text stored on a computer in Switzerland was nothing short of amazing.

So now I am sitting here in Lake Arrowhead, California, casually sharing files and communicating in real time with Eddie in Ireland and it’s no big deal. I know, though, that we have come a long way and the world has changed radically. And it’s happened entirely in my lifetime.

One more thing that caused me to think about globalization and a changing planet: Eddie is in Ireland, I’m in the US. I am also, as the name Coughlin should lead one to surmise, Irish American. All four grandparents… you know the drill if you’re Irish American. So I am here and Eddie is there. Eddie Wong, by the way. Small world.

A confluence of two factors will drive this alteration. First is the ready availability of online course material. I’m not talking here about the online universities that offer their courses for about the same price as a traditional university. In my experience many of these seem to simply be “diploma mills.” In fact, when I was a technology director for a suburban county in Northern Illinois, many of the well-to-do districts that I served would not accept salary schedule credit for teachers from these institutions. I’m talking instead about the good, free stuff.

The availability of good, free, online college course material actually began in 1999 in the nation that has really become a hotbed for educational innovation – Germany – while the U.S. stagnates under the myopic vision of No Child Left Behind. A university in Germany began publishing videos of lecture series and distributing them freely. (Read more about the open courseware movement in Wikipedia.)

In the U.S., the movement was launched by MIT through their OpenCourseWare initiative in which they now offer an astounding 2,100 courses available online. I had no idea that a university actually offered that many courses let alone for free! MIT has been joined by Stanford, Yale, UC Berkeley and others in this initiative. A typical offering includes audio or video versions of all lectures in the course, some produced very professionally, and support materials including notes, quizzes, and sometimes the actual textbook!

Of course, the OpenCourseWare movement has been around for awhile, and most people are familiar with at least a couple of examples of these programs. This fall, however, there will be a new entry in the movement. It’s called edX and it will be huge. EdX, a product of MIT and Harvard, running in an online course platform developed at MIT, takes open courseware to a new level. An edX course will include “video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback, student-ranked questions and answers, online laboratories, and student paced learning.” In addition, the two universities will grant Certificates of Mastery to those successfully completing the courses. The only missing piece is real live college credit, but I don’t think that will be far behind. And that’s because of the second factor. Student debt.

Increasingly in our nation we have a crisis in student debt. According to the non-profit American Student Assistance, there are currently approximately 9,000,000 U.S. students in four-year colleges carrying an average of over $12,000 in debt. These students also have an average of 4.6 credit cards with a per student balance averaging over $3,000. In 2007-2008, prior to the economic bust, private lenders were already lending about $17 billion to students, a 592% increase from a decade earlier. Most experts believe that poor economic conditions and rising fees have likely accelerated this debt accumulation among students.

I think that there is an obvious and unfortunate outcome at hand. Students will be allowed to test out of undergraduate education the same way that they can currently test out of high school in Michigan, Ohio, and virtually anywhere through the AP process that Kevin used. (If you don’t understand that sentence, you need to read Part 1 of Insights from Akron!)  With resources like edX, and the open courseware movement maturing, we have the mechanisms to allow motivated students with few resources to complete the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree for free. All that’s missing is the credit. The mechanism for assessing understanding and completion is there. It’s in the edX course Certificate of Mastery, which is not unlike the AP test credit scheme.

This could easily lead to most students avoiding a traditional campus experience and to college becoming an online activity with the rather stilted, artificial collaboration and interaction that this entails. The death of many American universities could ensue. Is this something to be excited about? I don’t think so.

I believe that a college education is about more than content knowledge. The experiences of leaving home, building both personal and professional connections, and working collaboratively with others are important elements of the maturation process supported by college life. Not to mention, of course, the parties. It seems a shame that this may only be available to students of means. For others, they may need to settle for online collaboration, and a free education completed at a desk in their parents home.

Several blogs have featured information about Cheryl’s presentation – most notably Blogwalker.

To download a copy of Cheryl’s presentation visit Cheryl’s community online at  learning.metiri.com

But that’s not what this entry is about. It’s about the impending death of undergraduate universities. It may take two blog entries to get there, though.

I had a conversation with several of the teachers at Inventors Hall of Fame about an article I wrote for Ed Leadership a couple of years ago. It is about the options for independent learning that are going to begin to tempt students away from high school. I focused on the true story of a student named “Kevin” who did the minimum in his high school classes, which he found to be boring and irrelevant. He focused instead on using the Internet and study guides to prepare for AP tests. In the end, he took only 3 AP classes in school, but took an additional 11 AP tests for which he had not taken the classes. He passed them all and, with the hours he earned and a couple of community college classes, bypassed the high school requirements for the University of California system and was accepted as a junior. Essentially, he made his high school irrelevant.

Several other trends are currently supporting the diminution of high schools as necessary for motivated students. In two of the states that we work with, programs are in place to allow students to take alternative, independent paths to high school completion.

In the first, Michigan has created a concept called the “seat time waiver.” This policy requires schools to create an alternative to traditional course taking, in which students can choose from a variety of programs, or prepare independently with no program at all, and be certified to have mastered course content through projects and assessments.

Also in Michigan, we are currently evaluating the Widening Advancements for Youth (WAY) program. This program completely restructures course credits around student interests. In the WAY program, at-risk or disaffected students working with teacher mentors create projects that are based on their own passions and interests. The mentors assist students in building content elements into these projects – writing, math, science concepts – which allow them to demonstrate the mastery of curriculum standards. WAY also provides independent learning resources to assist students in building the knowledge and skills necessary for successful completion of these projects. A sophisticated system of record keeping documents their progression through the curriculum, in a fashion that many educators would view as somewhat random. As they complete all requirements for a class, over the course of several projects, they receive credit for that course. Our early conversations with program teachers and leaders suggest that this program has drawn in many bright but disaffected students whose potential would surely have been otherwise wasted.

A similar program is in place in Ohio. Called the Ohio Credit Flexibility Plan, this program requires districts to devise a means for certifying course completion for students who have participated in alternative means of learning. The learning might be acquired through an alternative school, online courses, or, as in Kevin’s case, through independent effort.

Programs such as these are likely in place in other states, and if you know of any, I’d love to hear from you. Leave the info in the comments area below and others can see it as well. I’m out of room for this entry. We’ll continue in the next blog with the death of the American undergraduate university.

[Ed Coughlin, Senior VP]