The Living Schoolbook

After a two month sprint, we have designed and developed a new Sakai tool. Our first "Goal Aware" tool has been a modification to the existing Assignment tool that is packaged with Sakai. With this tool, faculty will be able to associate SOE proficiencies (a global goal set) with classroom assignments and rate student work as it pertains to those proficiencies. More importantly, it will provide them with the opportunity throughout the semester to decide how their assignments address the institution's teaching goals. This week we will be performing testing in-house with our own staff and hopefully a couple of faculty.

Our previous PT3 grant funded the LSB's development/training/use of a homegrown Learning Management System that we called Dialogue. When the School of Education received another PT3 grant a couple of years ago we considered adding more functionality to Dialogue to support "portfolio creation", a popular trend in education today. We later decided not to expand our Dialogue system but to build a new system just for the creation of portfolios.

While we were considering this, the School of Education was preparing for an NCATE accreditation review. Several faculty were interested in the use of portfolio systems to meet requirement #2 of NCATE. In a nutshell, this requirement states that the college has to have an information system that allows faculty to see whether or not they are effective in teaching students. The implication is that the system must be aware of the objectives of the institution and faculty and be able to report back some data about how students are progressing in relation to those objectives.

In the higher education world where I work there is an organization of IT professionals called Educause. This group performs research and does a little trend analysis to help us all understand what the big issues that IT professionals in the universities and colleges around the country are and how we are dealing with them. Many other industries have these communities of like minded professionals to help them network, benchmark, etc.

I recently looked for the same thing in the K12 world. I didn't find it.

In many New York State districts the school benefits by utilizing BOCES services to provide direction and perhaps provide the structure and community that these IT groups need. BOCES, however are unavailable to the Big Five school districts, including the Syracuse City School District, whom we work with quite a lot.