District Literacy Committee Meeting & SHS LMSs use of TRAILS

After the Elementary District Literacy Committee meeting today I reflected on three things:

1.) I heard from reading teachers at the meeting that elementary students have a more difficult time summarizing material from a nonfiction text than a fiction text. Library media specialists are in a good position to help with the improvement of students' abilities in that area, since much of research deals with summarizing information taken from nonfiction sources.

2.) Ahhh! To have the data! Data-driven instruction based on DRA scores and a variety of other assessments leads to the creation of instructional strategies and differentiated instruction to improve reading and writing skills. As media specialists and technology teachers we need to create/use more assessments that provides data to guide instruction.

3.)....and speaking of DATA -- at this morning's meeting with Julia Roberts and Robin Stiles, LMSs at SHS, Natalie Carrignan, director of instructional technology, and I viewed the recent data collected from an online assessment they gave to 5 English classes. This was a trial run of an online Tool for Real-time Assessment of Information Literacy Skills (TRAILS -- http://www.trails-9.org/ ) which Robin and Julia will have all 9th graders take during an orientation session at the beginning of next year. The resulting data will be used to determine what areas of instruction might be needed for whole group instruction or for the creation of short video tutorials that will be created for individual viewing by students on specialized topics (such as intellectual property or boolean operators!)

ITL Department Meeting on Assessment

Today we had three 45 minute ITL department meetings == all focusing on assessment.

High School: Robin Stiles, Julia Roberts and Rob Rogers are working on a 9th grade pre-assessment for next year. They are currently looking at TRAILS (Tools for Real Assessment of Information Literacy Skills) as a model for an online assessment that will be given as the first orientation class next year.

Middle School: John Horrigan, Deb Perry, Rita Hennessey, Kathy Fleming and Lauren Bullock reviewed the 5th grade assessment process to determine what information, if any, they could get about their 6th graders. They asked questions about the report card data, and suggested that the actual tools used to measure ITL success would be a valuable addition to the grades. Portfolios, which contained examples of students' best work, were suggested as another method to pass on information to middle school teachers.

Elementary School: Sarah Spencer, Kelley Auringer, Aimee Anctil, Tara Doyle, Michael Brownstein, Rae Anne Locke and Ken Hine reviewed the data from the first 5th grade report card on technology and research grades, with the intention that they would talk about the grades at an upcoming 5th grade level meeting at each school. We discussed what might be done to improve the process. We talked about the process used at SES to define each person's responsiblities in the grading process around specific lessons. We talked about the units of study which made up some of the process and products that were graded (primarily the study of ancient Egypt). We heard about the use of e-portfolios at KHS, where students identified their best piece of work from their research project, and defended their choice. Fixed scheduling was mentioned as one way to ensure that all students at each grade level received the same ITL information from the library media specialist. We also discussed the possibility of LMSs fixing a 5th grade technology class in their schedule at least one time each month to ensure that at least 10 times a year there would be a collaborative session with each 5th grade class. There will be one more analsyis of the report card grades this year, to see how grades compare between February and June.