I am working with a team as consultants to an urban STEM middle school, where PARCC is on the horizon and administrators and teachers are starting to get nervous. They work in a large school district, where data and test numbers matter in what one could only say is out of proportion to the work being done by these teachers. I don’t blame them for getting nervous about PARCC. There are shifts coming and the sense in the school is that students are not quite ready for the expectations of the writing. Maybe not the teachers, either.
So, as much to help them as to help me and my colleagues (PARCC is coming for us, too, but not this year) think about this testing, I tinkered around with a new tool in Diigo called Outliner, which allows you to outline bookmarks with notes. It seemed to work pretty well for me.
See what you think, and feel free to use any of the resources. Notice my first two resources and also my last category .. keeping teaching and learning in perspective as best as we can, you know?
Peace (yep, PARCC),
Kevin
Kevin, thanks for this resource! My school is in a similar situation- it’s a large urban district where lots of emphasis is placed on these kinds of instruments, and just had a conversation with my principal yesterday about what we need to be doing to maintain our regular teaching lives and also get kids ready for PARCC. I will be spending some time checking out these tools over the next few days!
We have a great resources for Common Core at our site. We have each standard on a different page with resources for each per grade level. Check it out here!
http://www.internet4classrooms.com/common_core/index.htm