I'm sorry. I was off work sick for Thur and Fri and didn't get better until today so I'm playing catch up. I'll review the SOSR II questions and, in light of your responses to SOSR I, determine if you need more help with the reading or if you are doing okay. If you would prefer to review any of that with me on Wed afternoon, let Janice know you are staying/coming in and we'll delay the assignment until Friday if that will help. The goal of the SOSR assignments is to begin to gain skills in engaging difficult reading and you are all making progress.

 

  SOSR II

Be sure to read my comments on your PICK activity and your SOSR I. There is a problem with one PBWorks site and I'll email that student today to get that fixed.

 

The overall suggestions I have for all of you concerning your reading responses are:

 

a.  don't go too quickly to thinking about your students, your classroom, and your school. We are wanting to step back and look more holistically at education as a profession. Notice that the application of the reading is to an entire profession. In some cases, I've highlighted the quotes in your SOSR I to point you in that direction.

 

b.  reread the quotes I've pulled out for comments and also read the context to settle into an idea of what it means. In other words, don't answer too quickly but draw back and think in broad terms.

 

Looking ahead, there will be one more SOSR reading response assignment. I'll get it out next Sunday evening and it will be due on the last day of class. It probably be a one question response to pull all of what we're looking at in SOSR together and provide an ending note for the course.

 

Here's the link to the Executive Summary of NCLB again.

 

PAT II

 

Good old PAT! What I'm trying to do is to seed your thinking for the future coursework and for your assessment project at the end of the degree. To that end, I developed old PAT to help you focus on policy and much of what must be considered when attempting to change or create school policy.

 

PAT I was a simple run through to get familiar with the categories addressed in PAT.

 

PAT II is a more serious attempt to unpack a policy and to create a new one.

 

For this activity, I'm going to place you in teams and have you use the EDU 510 PBWorks site (this one) for your collaboration.

 

Each team has its own PBWorks site for the creation of your PAT. You may not know it, but only one of you can be logged in a time so be sure to log off after you have contributed to your team's page. If you choose you can create additional team pages. For example, you may wish to share cell numbers to help with the coordination. This should be safe since each of the team pages is invite only and not open to the public.

 

Aim at settling on an issue and getting much of your PAT done by this time next week. I'll acquaint you with a very different presentation template for PowerPoint at that time so you can collaborate on presenting your pitch to your pretend school board via the PowerPoint you create as the final part of this PAT. (note: there is a line in the PAT for a link to this presentation)

 

Here we go---let me know if you see a problem. The appropriate PBWiki team site should show up on your list when you enter my.pbworks.com to log in:

 

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TEAM RED

 

Stubbs, Barbara

Smith, Dana                     

Nickell, Corey 

 

mwsuteamred.pbworks.com

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TEAM GOLD

 

Gustafson, Ann

Brinkley, Shelly  

 

mwsuteamgold.pbworks.com

 

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TEAM BLUE

 

Dotson, Ann 

Moyers, Amanda

Walker, Erin 

 

mwsuteamblue.pbworks.com

 

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Remember PICK. You're wanting to identify a pressing issue for the classroom, the school, the district, the state, or the national level. It should meet the PICK criteria and be something you can easily find an exemplar article or study about so you can pull out aspects of the problem, what has already been tried, what is being tried now that is new and innovative, projections of costs and resources, etc. You may wish to first settle on an issue by having each member come up with two or three possibilities. Then you may wish to parcel out the responsibilities.