Thanks – I think – to my friend Page Lennig for tagging me in the seven things meme.  The idea is you get tagged, you share seven things people are unlikely to know about you, and then you tag others to share their secrets.

So…here goes!

1. I am an international fastpitch softball official – and have traveled around the globe to work three world championships.
2. My favorite place in the whole world is Matthew’s Head in Fundy National Park (see photo).
3. I was once on a flight between Dublin and London and sat just behind Bono of U2.  He’s quite short.
4. I have undergraduate degrees in Geological Engineering and Education.  I came to teaching at the ripe old age of 39!
5. My family is half a Brady Bunch – my wife and I have each contributed two kids to the mix.
6. Nobody should ever confuse me with a mechanic or a handyman!
7. I used to manage a public radio station, and did some summer DJing at my hometown station.

Hmmm.  Now, who to tag?  How about…

• Mark Bates
• Kendra Haines
• Wendy Thomas
• Jeff Holder
• Erica Wilson
• Jennifer Cronk
• Vinny Vrotny

I have been aware of the Anywhere, Anytime Learning Foundation (AALF) for a couple of years and have followed their work from the periphery.  The AALF is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting access to learning by children around the world through access to 1:1 computing and other technology-rich programs.

This month’s issue of their regular on-line publication is special for teachers at our school.  Last fall I was asked to provide an article, focusing on how curriculum has changed since the introduction of our 1:1 program five year ago.  It was a pleasure to be able to showcase the work of our talented and dedicated staff.  You can read the full article here.

This summer, 14 of our staff will be representing the great work of their colleagues as we share our collective story as the 2009 Spotlight School at the Lausanne Laptop Institute in Memphis.  If you are a laptop school, thinking about a laptop program or even looking at ways to leverage technology-rich environments for learning, I would love for you to join us in July.  The AALF co-sponsors this event with the host Lausanne Collegiate School.

Click on the badge in the top right of this blog for details on the conference. Hope to see you there.

Technorati tags: technology, education, whipple, learning, laptopinstitute, aalf

Last week was exam week at our local high schools.  As the father of a Grade 10 student – and having had three kids pass through high school already – I have had conflicting feelings about summative testing.  I wanted my kids to do well for self-esteem and future opportunities, but have always felt, even prior to becoming a teacher, that exams were less than an authentic measure of a person’s knowledge and thus have tried to downplay any expectations of what it meant to be successful.

As I picked up my son last week after his last of five exams for the first term, my ideas about these rituals began to crystallize.  Piling into the car, I asked him how his exam went.  His response – as usual – “OK”.

After a brief pause he asked rhetorically;

“Why do we write exams?  They are kind of like cheating.  They don’t measure what we know. They give us all this information, we memorize it, we write it on the paper and then forget it.  We don’t really learn anything.”

Whoa!  The kids even see how false is their supposed “learning”.  I was blown away by the simplicity of his insights, shared by his friend in the back seat.

So, if we can agree that simple content recall isn’t a measure of anything but how well a student has learned to “play school”, what is the answer?

I would argue that exams don’t need to be eradicated, just modified.  Instead of closed-book, content focused assessments where students simply regurgitate answers fed to them by a teacher over the course of several weeks, why not focus on the process.  Exams could look different, like real-life.

My supervisor has recounted how he gave an “exam” once where he gave one question; design and create a solution to a problem.  All information was available, the issue was authentic and the solution might not even be limited to course content.  Wouldn’t this be a better measure of student learning?

For now, my son has helped my learning process.  You see, it’s in the (sometimes brief) conversations where real learning takes place.

How would / could our exams look different five years from now?

Technorati tags: technology, education, whipple, learning

Photo Credit: Setting The Tone For the Exam; Uploaded to Flickr on June 8, 2006 by rileyroxx