Alltop.com is a great social media tool that aggregates blog sites together and groups them in helpful ways. We at Empowered High Schools are now posted on this site. We are posted on the Education Page. This site is a great way to find out what is being said across the net in your preferred interest area. It’s one of those tools that can really expedite your learning curve. Please check it out.
Charles
The Collaborative Classroom: An Interview with Linda Darling-Hammond | Edutopia.
Beth DuBose at the Spectrum K12 blog recently posted on this wonderful video that was presented at the Edutopia site. Edutopia has a great deal of video content that is great for viewing while eating lunch, etc. It is a great way for me to squeeze in little snippets of professional development. While I am leary of pushing the commercial causes of companies like Spectrum, the fact that they have bloggers committed to sharing information says a lot about the company.
Throughout all of our work, we continually advocate using tools, protocols and standardized practices. Before I have a chance to be misunderstood, we don’t advocate lock-step adherence to these ideas. Our communities expect that schools operate with incredible fluidity and flexibility. With our overlapping and often contradictory expectations from our stakeholders we will never be able to be as regimented as some people fear.
That being said, it is nice to have some basic processes that enable work and can ultimately ensure the speed and success of new programs and interventions. As a team goes through a brainstorming process [it's coming, check back and see] they should utilize some process for evaluating their ideas. There are a lot of different methods. It’s an extra step that can seem monotonous, but it will create better ideas and improve implementation.
One such tool is provided by Charles “Chic” Thompson and I found it at the InnovationTools.com website. It is a simple list of questions for evaluating ideas.
There is a lot of great content at the InnovationTools site. You should check it out. I’ll be sharing some tools that we have discovered at that site in the future.
Thanks for reading.
Charles
With all of the online research that I’ve done on RtI, I’m surprised that I haven’t come across this page in the past. This page has a relatively long list of links to online resources. I’ve read many of them in the past and they were seminal in the work that we have done. I wish that I had found this site a few years ago, it would have saved me hours. Using library databases and trying to find free databases is very time consuming. Going straight to this resources page will save you a great deal of time.
Do you have other online resources that should be included?
Thanks for reading.
Charles
At our recent excursion to Washington D.C. to present at the National Staff Development Conference, I was struck by the lack of knowledge about RtI throughout the country. Several states were moderately informed, but representatives from other states were completely unaware. I’m glad to see in this post from Spectrum K-12 that the feds are working to expand RtI implementation.
RTI, Special Education and IEP software for educators | Spectrum K-12.
This is a quick little post, but I think it can be very valuable if everyone helps out. We know that we are getting quite a few readers and we would like to activate the collective knowledge of the readership.
So, we’re asking you to submit, via comments, school websites that have materials on RtI. We’re going to make a new page linked off the main page so that schools personnel can find the best work of other schools.
Here are a few submissions to get us started:
Indian Prairie District 204, Naperville, IL http://ipsdweb.ipsd.org/
You’ll have to search around, but it’s a treasure trove of parent letters and school improvement plans.
Colorado Springs District 11, Colorado Springs, CO http://www.d11.org/rt
Very important site. It has lot’s of good practical materials.
Rolling Meadows High School, Rolling Meadows, IL http://rmhs.d214.org/RMHSModel/
The only true “school website”. They’re model extends far past RtI and is deeply built upon Professional Learning Teams. Truly brings theory into practice.
Matteson Elementary School District 162, Matteson, IL http://www.sd162.org/rti.htm
Sadly, has some broken links. Nonetheless has some good information and, hopefully, more is coming.
Now, to leave a link, clink on the light gray “comments” link to the right of the title of this post. Feel free to post the links of your school or district’s RtI page.
I’m looking forward to hearing from you.
Charles