Midwest Education and Technology Conference

I’m in St. Louis at the Midwest Education and Technology Conference, one of the stops on the 2005-06 Out of Options Tour, which grinds to a final merciful, screeching halt on June 22, 2006 in hot, dry and dusty Amarillo, Texas, when it will be time to move on to bigger and better things. I’ll be presenting on Wednesday morning and afternoon after a pre-game meal Tuesday night at Dierdorf and Hart’s (they have a 16 oz filet-how about that, David?) where I will consume some of St. Louis’ finest beef. We’ll see if the restaurant is good enough to make the list of finer dining establishments listed on my JakesNation page.

On Wednesday morning, it will be 21st Century Assessment: Rethinking the Classroom Test, where I’ll talk about our work in my school district with inquiry-based learning and information literacy, and how we have used both assessment for learning and assessment of learning strategies to radically change how we assess students during the course of a traditional “unit.” This approach also includes assessing students in the library where they have access to all the information tools and resources at their disposal for problem-solving that they normally would have as adults, in a complete re-working of the classic unit test. The idea for this program had its genesis with David Warlick during steak at Gibson’s in Chicago, and has been implemented by three teachers who get after it, Chris Gales, James Workman and Scott Parker, all of Downers Grove South High School.

In the afternoon, it will be The New Shape of Information, which is my take on blogs, wikis, RSS, etc. I’ll start with eight slides from different aspects of the Hurricane Katrina disaster that dramatically illustrate how information is created, distributed, accessed and utilized in 2006. Then its back home in 43 minutes on American to the greatest city in the world-Chicago, home of the World Series Champions, the Chicago White Sox. Pitchers and catchers report in less than two weeks….