This is a distance learning workshop, concentrating on uses of the Internet for teaching, learning and professional development. It also is intended to give you enough web sites and leads-in to more web sites to be a continuously useful resource for your learning and doing.
Assessment is based on work you produce in series of essays/listings for topic you "connect with," and with an annotated lists of sites supporting your views and reflecting your web work.
For instance, you might write “The site XXXX [http://www.xxx.com] gave me a different perspective on how to help students learn _____. It also cleared up for me something I was confused about, and that is what educators mean by __________.” Certainly you would want to elaborate more.
This work may be emailed to me at ozpk100@aol.com, or snail-mailed to me at Chad C. Osborne 13634 Leadwell St., Van Nuys, CA 91405. If you email the work, you may wish to put it in a Zip file, which compresses text and makes it easier to send over the 'Net.
This work links to web projects and problem based curricular units that provide guiding questions, large ideas, and active methods--diverse and intellectually active forms of instruction--to bring Frameworks, strands, standards, and examples of state curriculum requirements to life. Teachers who realize that the Frameworks have no curricular structure see how much it distorts their curriculum when they try to reshape it to fit the Frameworks. There is no shape to this muddle of isolated facts, concepts, theories and viewpoints, often set at cross-purposes to each other.
Rather the Frameworks must be adapted to fit meaningful curriculum and authentic, essential questions. "Teaching to the Test," the random sample of questions based on the jumble of Frameworks, does NOT mean coverage and drill of terminology and facts. It means encountering terms and facts in intellectually and emotionally provocative learning. Most Frameworks are by-products of learning and understanding, not the object of learning.
Coverage does NOT maximize scores. The tax on memory, the lack of understanding and organization, all make coverage largely a waste of time.
THE FRANCIS W. PARKER CHARTER SCHOOL is a top standardized test-scoring Charter whose curriculum and rubrics are centered on essential questions and active inquiry projects. Spend enough time reading and reprinting examples of the approaches used at this charter school to give you evidence for the DEPTH side of the depth vs. coverage issue, and include annotated reprints in your portfolio.
The following nine links are for a self-directed final portion of this workshop. Work on as many sites as appear of value; reprint, highlight and annotate links from at least three of these sites.
Chad C. Osborne
13634 Leadwell St.
Van Nuys, CA 91405
