Why we test

Testing begins tomorrow

Three weeks of stress

Adults with fingers wagging, voices shouting, eyes rolling

Kids unable to articulate their shame for not knowing

Insecure clicks on the screen

Going to bed early is never enough not to yawn through

disconnected text, numbers, diagrams

And for what?

                from Testing begins tomorrow, Marian Dingle, April 20, 2019 (Thanks @jverduin.) 

When Ms Dingle bemoans "testing" in her poetic post from which the excerpt above was taken, I believe she means standardized testing, taken on a computer or other digital device. "State testing" causes anxiety for students, (some) parents, teachers and especially administrators. Oh, and more than a few technology directors get a little tense when the testing does not go well due to technical difficulties.

Yet standardized testing continues to grow unchecked. Back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and I was in school, I remember taking the Iowa Test of Basic Skills aka Iowa Test of Educational Development. Fill in the bubbles that appeared on two sides of a sheet of paper over the course of a couple days. Get the results in the spring. (My daughter always called the ITED test the Idiotic Test of Endless Dots.) I was good test taker and tended to score high so I gave ITBS/ITED little thought and probably not a lot of effort. Although I was not like some of my peers who used the dots to simply make enchanting patterns on the page. I have no idea how or if the results were used by teachers. I don't believe district assessment coordinators had been invented yet in the 50s and 60s.

My last school district had a testing calendar that spanned the year, with each student taking multiple tests, consuming an ever greater amount of instructional time. Lots of money was spent on the tests and even more on the district and building level staff administering the tests and analyzing the results. Add in the cost of plenty of tech time helping make sure the computers, Chromebooks and networks were up to snuff. I am unconvinced any child ever actually benefited from all this testing.

So why, if it seems nobody much likes standardized tests, do we continue using them. I see some reasons...

Economy. While it is costly to assess students using standardized test, it is more economical that hiring human beings to assess using competency-based tasks, skill demonstrations, and portfolios. Tough to run that project through the Scantron machine. Objective, summative test are fast. Authentic assessment is slow.

Objectivity. While good rubrics and checklists can bring a degree of objectivity and consistency to the evaluation of student performance, a good-old multiple guess or T/F test eliminates the chance that a human might bring something personal to the task of judging whether the student answers correctly. Too bad most of what can be measured in this fashion is easily Googled as well. 

Accountability. With the shear amount of money going into education, the public wants to know how well schools are doing and especially how well their child's school is doing compared to the school next district over. Politicians and real estate agents like hard numbers for their own purposes as well. The numbers may not mean anything, may not be used correctly, or can certainly be spun in many ways - but they are numbers and in numbers we trust. 

The problem education reformers have is the lack of trust the public has in other means of determining how a child or teacher or school or district or state or nation is doing in educating its youth. Until education has an alternative means of assessment that is economical, objective, and holds schools accountable, we will have standardized tests.

T or F?

BFTP: 10 ways to use technology to promote reading

I am updating my workshop on how technology can be used to promote Voluntary Free Reading - the only undebatably fool-proof means of both improving reading proficiency and developing a life-long love of reading in every student. This list started with "The last of the book-only librarians" column from back in 2011. 

Let me be right up front about this: I am primarily sharing the good ideas of other far smarter people that I could ever pretend to be. Some primary sources for this list include:

• Beaman, Anita and Amy Obert. Reading 2.0 website (I can't find this one anymore.)
• Ludwig, Sarah "Going Beyond the BookTalk: Breathing New Life Into Book Programming with Technology"
• Valenza, Joyce. Reading 2.0 slide show <www.slideshare.net/joycevalenza/reading20>

I only steal from the best. So here we go. Johnson's Top Ten...

1. Author and fan websites. Young readers like know more “about the author” and the Internet is rich with resources produced both by the authors themselves, their publishers, and their fans. Want to know what’s next in a favorite series? Check the author’s page or blog. Want to read more about a favorite character? Check the “fanfiction” often written by other young readers. That popular new movie jsut might be based on a novel that's in the library, so media ties-ins are powerfully motivating. Clever librarians find ways of helping students easily locate these materials by pasting printed lists of websites or QR codes in the backs of books or by adding links as a part of the electronic bibliographic record in the catalog.
2. Sharing/social networking sites. Making reading a social activity no longer means just having a weekly book club meeting. Make sure older kids know about free websites like Shelfari, LibraryThing, and Goodreads. Biblionasium id great for younger readers. If you want a "walled-garden" program that allows sharing, ibrary automation programs like Follett’s Destiny Quest allow students to record what they’ve read, write recommendations, share their recommendations with other students and discuss books online. Figment is designed just for aspiring authors to share their own writings with others.
3. Curation tools for student use. While not designed just for sharing reading interests like the tools above, generic curation tools like Pinterest, Tumblr, ScoopIt allow the selection and sharing of interests among students. Student read what other students recommend and get excited about.
4. Library/student productivity tools. Book “reports” take on a whole new look when readers are allowed to use multimedia tools to generate creative responses to books - and then share them with other students online. Using Glogster, Animoto, poster makers, digital image editors and dozens of other (usually) free tools, students can communicate through sight and sound as well as in writing. Make sure these student-created products are available for other students to see via GoogleDrive, Dropbox, YouTube, Slideshare, or other sites that make the work public - or at least viewable by others within the school.
5. Library promotion webpages. Good library sites, of course, promote good books. But the best homepages hook readers through slideshows, videos, widgets, and podcasts - generating interest in print through media. (How about the stuff kids create themselves?)  Creative librarians do surveys and polls on book related topics using free online tools like GoogleApps Forms and SurveyMonkey. (Collect requests for new materials using an online form as well.) Does your library have a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account to let kids know about new materials - and remind them of classics?
6. Get flashy with digital displays. Screen-savers on library computers put books right in front of kids faces. So do digital picture frames sitting on the circ desk that scroll book covers. Does your school have a messaging system that runs on monitors in the hallway that could include the "read of the day"?
7. Virtual author visits. Author visits can generate a lot interest in books and reading, but unless only local authors come to the school, such visits may not fit a library’s budget. But it is far less expensive to bring an author in virtually using Skype, Google Hangouts or othe video conferencing program. Check out the Skype an Author Network website to get some ideas.
8. E-book libraries and e-book apps. Take advantage of those tablets, smart phones and other student-owned (or school provided) devices by making sure your e-book collection, digital magazines, and other digital resources are easy to find. Students are showing a growing preference for reading in digital formats. Even if your library does not have the budget for commercial e-materials, provide links to repositories of open source e-books like Project Gutenberg and ICDL. Link to the materials that your public library system may offer. (Ours provides access to dozens of popular magazines via Zinio to students having a public library card.)
9. Reading self-assessment tools. While subject to no small degree of debate in the educational community, programs like Accelerated Reader can be motivating for many students. E-book libraries like MyOnReader are now including self-assessment reading ability and interest tests and means of students being able to track their own reading levels and amount read. Will being able to find books that interest a student - at a level that they can comprehend - spark reading? I think so.
10. _________ As is the practice with lists of ten presented on the EduTech blog, #10 here has been left deliberately blank, as both an invitation for people to tell me what I have missed (or ignored), and as an acknowledgement that my own knowledge of such things is decidedly incomplete. [I totally stole this, but forgot to record the source. Mea culpa, but it's too good not to re-use. - Doug]

Here's the thing. Technology is not going away. The question we as librarians need to ask ourselves is if we want to fight a losing battle against it - or we figure out how to use these tools and resources to achieve our goal of making all students life-long readers. To me, this is a no-brainer.

Original post 2/10/14

My income tax song

I'm happy to have income on which to pay taxes.

I'm happy to have income on which to pay taxes.

I'm happy to have income on which to pay taxes.

I'm happy to have income on which to pay taxes.

The little song above (perhaps more of a mantra) is what I sing to myself each year as I prepare the information my tax preparer needs to file for me. It works quite nicely to put into perspective the aggravation of the task and the displeasure most of feel in writing out a check to Uncle Sam or Auntie State.

This year I paid enough in federal taxes to pay off my two-year-old car loan. I paid enough in state taxes to pretty much replace all the decrepit, but still functional, appliances in my kitchen and laundry room. I am told that a lot of people pay no taxes at all - those who make less than a certain annual income (I'm OK with that) and those who make so much money they can afford to to pay others for advice on how not to pay taxes at all. (I'm not so OK with that.) I believe income should be considered income whether earned or from investments and be taxed at the same rate.

Like most of us, there are some places I am happy my tax dollars go: to parks, to education, to roads, to police and fire protection. And there are some ways I am less happy about my tax dollars being spent: a too-large military, corporate subsidies, legal battles in legislatures. I wish minimum wage was high enough that my taxes did not need to go to helping workers with food, housing, and child care - even if a Big Mac cost a little more. I wish we lived in a society where we all took care of those in our families better so the government didn't have to. But to each his/her own. 

Overall, I am grateful that I have income on which to pay taxes. Try my little song next April 15th. See if it works for you.