Blogs

Humans spend a lot of time and effort simplifying processes, making tasks more efficient, and finding better ways to get things done. The ultimate goal of innovation, after all, is to make life better, easier, and more fulfilling. In a stark contrast to this goal, Rube Goldberg’s whimsical and complicated designs brought humor and fun to engineering and physics, appealing to learners of all ages.

Last summer, I spent some time with upper-elementary and middle school-aged students who were involved in a week-long art camp. The focus was portraiture, and the students could not have been less excited. The instructor immediately captured their attention, however, by discussing the types of portraits found in Harry Potter, with their subjects possessing the ability to move and to visit their other paintings elsewhere in the world.

Each week for the past couple of years, Joann and I have discussed how teachers can use resources from the Gateway to 21st Century Skills to successfully integrate a huge variety of topics into their classrooms. I have learned so much by researching and discovering new ways to incorporate different types of resources into classrooms throughout the world. Since Gateway resources are aligned to standards, teachers are able to easily fit the ones they want to use into the framework of their particular required standards.

In my last column, I gave a brief overview of our Achievement Standards Network, or the ASN. The ASN is a vast (and ever-growing) repository of educational and professional standards that are described using rich metadata. The ASN uses concept terms with controlled vocabularies in order to maintain accuracy and consistency, and brings a host of other advantages for researchers and developers. That’s all fine and dandy (and it really is – believe me!) but let’s cut to the chase: How does using the ASN benefit educators and librarians who just really want to locate relevant academic standards quickly and efficiently?

We are teachers. We are in charge of making sure that students in our little corner of the world learn everything they need to know in our grade, our subject, or our specialty. It’s an art that can take years to perfect. The constantly changing standards, tests, infrastructure, and policies in the education world can further complicate the process. The new direction of my monthly column will take us on a journey to make sense of the best way to use open-source resources and free technology to support planning and teaching based on standards.

In the mid-1990s, standards-based education in the U.S. was enacted under the Clinton administration, and further refined under President George W. Bush. The legislation sought to improve American student performance by instituting more rigorous testing, and by holding schools accountable for student performance on these tests. However, since each state had its own process for creating and implementing educational standards, the content that students were expected to learn in one state was sometimes vastly different from the expectations in another state.