The recent "Education Nation" summit brought a new digital toolkit for parents, including academic "growth charts" that spell out what kids should be learning at each grade level.
The toolkit, which also offers guidance for parent-teacher conferences, is also available as a mobile app. Still to come are grade-level guidelines on social development and health and wellness.
The site, created by NBC and Pearson, seems useful to me, putting the new national academic "Common Core" standards into plain English. But my days of monitoring homework and attending conferences are over. I'm interested in hearing what parents and teachers think.
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Academic growth charts offer parent guidance
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2 comments:
Not a bad find.
I think it's always good to have more resources for parents.
I've used quite a bit of online information while teaching our kids, some bad and some good.
I think sites where the teachers share lesson plans are a good idea. Provided there is also some way to modify, improve, and critique them.
That's an idea that's been around in other circles such as software development (and even corporate consulting) with some success.
There is even a bit of a movement to develop lesson plans similar to the way "open source" code is developed.
That is what the "Share My Lesson" resource seems to be developed around (and there are many others out there).
I think some of these will be promising, but there will be some shakedown before the winners emerge.
As "evaluations" go, I like to use a variety from time to time just to see how we're doing.
I recently gave my son a math assessment for the Singapore Math curriculum.
Now, according to all the public school tests, he is performing somewhere around the fifth grade level.
He is in the third grade.
The Singapore Math evaluation placed him squarely in the third grade, so I'm starting him with that curriculum since it contained quite a few things he hadn't seen yet and appears to be a well-thought out curriculum.
At least with Singapore, you know they aren't a bunch of math dummies.
One of his textbooks in school last year was horrible.
(And this year, our public school is having problems granting parents access to the online math text, so I haven't been able to read it yet.)
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