Digital Directions - Fall 2012 - (Page 40)

Teacher Adrian Gutierrez uses Kindle Fire tablets with students in his Spanish 1 class at Lindsay High School. Principal Jaime Robles says the school used to ban cellphones and tablet computers, but now it embraces them. “This is how students communicate and learn,” Robles says. “So we are using the tools that they use to keep them engaged.” parents can check to see students’ exact progress in each content area at any point in time. But just because students now learn at their own pace does not mean that students can take multiple years to get through one content level, emphasizes Rooney. “Pace does matter,” he says. “Our system is about increasing the rigor and holding everyone accountable—administrators, learners, and learning facilitators.” Students who are more than two content levels below their grade levels receive individualized learning plans to help them catch up to their peers. Those students are allowed to test out of certain parts of the curriculum that they may already know to increase their pace. Ultimately, though, what CBE comes down to is good teaching, Rooney says. Providing good feedback, making sure that students learn what they need to know before they move on, and differentiating instruction for each student is what good teachers have always done, he says. The Boston Day and Evening Academy, an alternative high school in the Roxbury section of Boston that serves overage, undercredited students, has been using competency-based education since it opened 17 years ago, says the director of curriculum and instruction, Alison Hramiec. The school, which does not use a traditional grading scale or group students by grade levels, has broken down each yearlong course into 11-week classes so that students have more flexibility to move from one class to the other. “With this population of students in particular, they leave school, they have poor attendance, different situations arise, and they may fall behind in that class,” Hramiec says. In a traditional school, she says, “when they get back to school, everyone’s far ahead, and there’s no flexibility to get those kids caught up.” But at the Boston Day and Evening Academy, students have the flexibility to start up where they left off, she says. Like Lindsay Unified, the Boston Day and Evening Academy has spent several years aligning the curriculum with state standards and breaking it down into need-to-know competencies. “You start with [the standards] and from there pull out what you believe are the enduring understandings,” says Hramiec. “Those are the big learning objectives that are the ones you want 40 >> www.digitaldirections.org  http://www.digitaldirections.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Digital Directions - Fall 2012

Digital Directions - Fall 2012
Contents
Editor's Note
DD Site Visit
Bits & Bytes
Shifting to Adaptive Testing
Tailoring the Tests To Special Needs?
Choosing the Right Device
Bandwidth Demand Rising
Are You Ready?
Where’s the Money?
High-Priority Virtual PD
Online PD Destinations
Virtual Ed. Dives In to the Common Core
Open Education Resources Surge
Security

Digital Directions - Fall 2012

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