Resources
Helping you stay in the know
Each of the following will link you to a resources we feel will help you better understand areas keep to learning, education, and evaluation.
Evaluation 101
A place to start if you are new to evaluation or just want a nice refresher.
Evaluation Planning
Use this a guide to help you plan your next evaluation project. A fully narrated presentation.
Developing a logic model
The logic model can be the heart of your evaluation and this presentation will walk you through the different components and how to develop one for yourself.
Defining Impact
The Impact Method developed by Davis and Scalise will help you refine what it means to have impact, how it is measured, and what your results may mean.
Essential Questions
Essential questions were conceived by Dr. Theodore Sizer, Dean of Brown University School of Education after studying high schools in this country for a Carnegie research project. His book, Horace's Compromise describes the frustration of a teacher trying to help his students develop their knowledge and skills. Among factors like the schedule, course structures, the evaluation process and the physical space, Horace felt like the most important questions were almost impossible to address.
Using Essential Questions
What are essential questions and how can they benefit your project and evaluation. Find out here.
Making the Most of Technology
We can make the most of technology only when we think about what it can do for us, not what we must do for it. We need to use technology for research, problem solving, skillbuilding, communicating and presenting our ideas. With these goals "in mind," our mind's eye guides us to make technology an extension of ourselves, not unwieldy tools we must constantly bend to our purposes.
Building A Community of Practice
Communities of Practice are powerful tools that have for centuries helped members share information, grow their knowledge, and become better practitioners.
Digital Portfolios
In 1993, a team at the Coalition of Essential Schools asked a simple question, "How could technology support exhibitions of student work?" The goal was twofold; help students to show how they are meeting high standards of achievement and who they are as individual learners. During the last dozen years, technology has progressed at a rapid pace, and schools are facing many new challenges in assessing what students know and are able to do. Digital portfolios are more viable than ever for learning and assessment. In our work across many different projects, we have learned a number of lessons that we present here as a dozen lessons that resonant across our work and that we hope will inform yours.
Integrating Digital Portfolios
The best digital portfolios are an integral part of the learning process. They capture the waves of action and reflection that characterize the learning process. On this digital canvas, the results and the processes of learning are intertwined through ongoing reflection. Classes that are developing a portfolio culture have groups of students who are explorers, celebrate the milestones they reach, and understand the discoveries that surround their learning.
Reflective Practice
When Phil Bossert asked me to join his Hawaii Education Resource Network team for a technology boot camp last summer, we looked for ways to create energy for keeping the community alive after the summer workshop. My role became a "reflective moment," stopping
into groups across campus and asking them to practice reflecting on what they were doing and learning in the archive. The "brain hat" and the cards in my carpenter's belt meant that they knew I was coming. Here are the cards without the colors or the flipside format.
Story Telling
Story telling is a valuable tool to help you share the narrative and engage your readers. Here are a number of wonderful story telling resources.
PBL Course Development
This paper will describe our experience in designing, developing, and implementing an online graduate course using problem based learning (PBL) as the approach to staff development. The course was designed purposely to model PBL and its support of the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996).
Interested in reading more? Get in touch with us today. Please feel free to use these resources but please reference their source. TLC, Inc.