Weekly+Journal+for+Dec.+6-13

This week my team spent time revising our student needs assessments, based on the peer review information we received from last week. I believe our revised version of the assesment will provide us with information that should be helpful to guiding our future planning. We had the students complete the assessments on Thursday and Friday, and will have the results to begin looking at this weekend. In our weekly meeting we also discussed some of the obstacles we have faced so far, and may face in the future as we try to implement some of our technology plans. One of the biggest of those may be the resources available to us in a district facing serious financial hardship. Even with the money available from the grant, there may be things we simply can not do/have. The videos for this week were very good. Rather than just saying what skills should be taught in a 21st century environment, we actually got to see some in action. The project based learning activities shown in the video were very inspiring. It was great to see students truly engaged in learning they felt was valuable. I hope we will be able to include some of those types of learning activities in our building in the future. Clearly, having students that engaged in their learning will provide them with skills they can rely on in the future, The problem would again seem to be how to provide the accountability required by our current system, while providing students the opportunity to engage in project based learning. Hopefully we will have the backing of those in charge of our district to try to implement these types of projects in the future. Although the results of such learning may be difficult to document in our current system of assessment, I believe students who are truly engaged in what they are learning will outperform those who are simply being taught what the state will be testing. We need to focus more on teaching students __how__ to learn, rather than just __what__ they need to learn. I am still a bit confused as to what we are going to be doing for our video/movie. We have a collaboration day set for this Friday, where I hope to get a better grasp of the project. We should also be able to begin using our student assessment results to plan our future work. Mark