Saturday March 12th
Another great day in begins in New Delhi. We started with a keynote speech from Sridhar Rajagopalan of Educational Initiatives. He discussed his approach to assessments for India that are created by his company. He wondered why cell phone are updated every three months but schooling never seems to change? His approach to testing is to produce low stakes tests that function as benchmarks to inform instruction. He finds students full of science misconceptions that are revealed by testing. His product produces personalized reports and has remediation Mindspark software. The focus should be, "what are they getting, not what am I covering." They are helping to move from an "assessment of learning" model to an "assessment is learning" one. Great talk.
We then switch our focus to assessment of our projects. Stephan Vincent-Lacrin of OECD helped focus us on the elements of a good study and useful assessments. We then turned to members of our group to explore how we are planning to assess our grant projects. We struggled with the idea of assessing learning exchanges like ours and and discussed ways to identify measurable outcomes and construct a control group. This is going to require more thought!
We then received a brief tutorial of a web site known as the Navigator Project and were exposed to a grant program from Google to encourage innovation in education.
Next , Jim from HP announced another round of funding to participants to support intra-consortia sharing and connecting. One of the values of this project is professional sharing between projects. This really had everyone's wheels spinning!
After a short break we then visited two workshops of our choice and a display poster sessions of 1/2 of the participant projects. It was a nice chance to ask more questions about the great topics being covered from around the world.
Last stop for the night was a local public school which put on a science fair for us to demonstrate their skills. It was fun. The kids were great. They were very enthusiastic and really wanted to connect with all of us. They were taking pictures with us and liked practicing their English with us.
Before we left HP generously left three dream screen computers behind for the school!
What a day!
Repectfully Submitted.
Jim Forde and Bryan Olkowski.
As Sridhar Rajagopalan of Educational Initiatives mentioned, cell phones are updated every 3 months, yet education never seems to...this is where we need to continue to be creative in the classroom. The students we have today are going to be much different learners than we have next year and the year after. It is so essential we meet the needs of our students with the media they are familiar with...technology!
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