MassCUE Conference Happenings

Wednesday I attended Day 1 of the 2011 MassCUE conference at Gillette Stadium, and it was exciting as usual! Lots of great presenters, vendors, and opportunities to share ideas with colleagues made for a productive and engaging day.

The Spotlight Session entitled, "MA New Educator Evaluation Regulations: Opportunity and Challenges" presented by Karla Brooks Baehr provided an opportunity to learn more about the details in the developing story of the new educator evaluation regulations (with specific discussions about positions such as technology integration specialists that work with both staff and students). Two major takeaways from this session were that (1) both teachers and administrators should be taking time to become VERY familiar with the state's growth model, since this is one of the measures that will be used (where applicable) for educator evaluation; and (2) the Commonwealth's Model System is on target to be available for review on January 10, 2012. A variety of resources, including a version of the PowerPoint that was presented at the conference, are available on the ESE's Educator Evaluation web page.

Associate Commissioner Bob Bickerton and Director of Information Services Rob Curtin presented "Next Generation Supports for Teaching, Learning, and Student Success" which highlighted a variety of initiatives within ESE, including the new Curriculum Frameworks, PARCC, and many RTTT projects, especially the Teaching and Learning System which is currently under discussion. The ESE Showcase area provided an opportunity for conference attendees to learn more about initatives including the Education Data Warehouse, Thinkfinity Partnership, PBS LearningMedia Partnership, and the Teaching and Learning System.

The final session of the day entitled, "The Paperless Classroom: Tips and Tricks for the 21st Century Educator" was fascinating and introduced attendees to a wide variety of Web 2.0 tools I had not seen before. While these tools are not data-specific, I'd like to share some them here for those of you with an interest in staying current with educational technology. The presenter, Melissa Panchuck from the Fessenden School, was incredibly passionate and engaging about her use of Web 2.0 tools with her 5th grade students, including:

• Glogster - virtual posters
• Google Sketchup -
• Pixton - online comics
• Blabberize - talking pictures
• Go!Animate and XtraNormal - animations
• Screenr - instant screencasts
• diigo - link collections and highlighting
• issuu - digital publishing

 So many new and exciting tools (both inside and outside the classroom!) that can be used to improve teaching and learning!

Data News from MassCUE

I attended one day of the fabulous MassCUE conference at Gillette Stadium on Wednesday 10/28, and wanted to share some of the things I learned. I will come back and post links to the session resources here once they are up on the MassCUE Web site.

I attended a session entitled, "Formative Assessment using Google Apps," presented by the Harwich Public Schools. They have used Google Forms to easily create online quizzes to check student understanding...with instant results tallied to a Google spreadsheet! I have used Google Forms for surveys and the like (similar to Zoomerang and Survey Monkey, but free and unlimited, with data automatically collected in a back end spreadsheet) but it was interesting to see it used to check student understanding and used immediately to inform instruction.

Jeff Comenitz from the ESE's Data Warehouse team had a plethora of information about the DART tool, the growth model, the SIF project, and the new Student Course Schedule (SCS) data collection. (Of course, if you're a follower of this blog, none of these topics are new to you!) He shared some sample teacher-level Data Warehouse reports which are being developed for next fall, once the teacher and student data are connected in the Data Warehouse.

Associate Commissioner Bob Bickerton spoke on "Using Data and New Tools for Decision Making and Continuous Improvement." He highlighted not only the various data collection initiatives (SIMS, EPIMS, SCS, SIF) but also plans for the RTTT-funded "teaching and learning system." He acknowledged the performance challenges that the Data Warehouse is currently encountering, and described how the SLDS grant funds are being used in part to re-architect the Data Warehouse to improve performance and support wider use of the tool.

I spoke with many of the student information system vendors as well as some vendors offering data management tools. I would like to better understand the capabilities of the various systems to handle local data, so that I can help districts in our region understand what options are available to them based on the tools that they may already have in place.

We did get to hear from Jonathan Kraft at lunchtime, however, rain prevented the Patriots from taking the practice field so, sadly, I don't have any Tom Brady sightings to report.