Far Out

I finally got tired of the old green background that was really for St. Patrick's Day.  So now Welfyville is just a little far out...

Update on the grant our school district wrote and won.  Two middle schools will participate in the grant this next year.  They are adding quite a bit of time in seat for the kiddies, and much more time in seat for teachers as well.  There will be professional development "until your eyeballs roll" was the way the district liaison put it.  Since our school is next on the hit list I went to the meeting last night to hear what they were planning.  Also, there is an Ed Tech job available at one of the middle schools and I am applying for it.  Not much chance of getting that as I didn't even get a second look at the jobs available at the district, but hey, I'm building interview skills.

Anyway, I'm going to put a survey on the side of the page to see who likes the new blog look.  If they did a survey of who likes the new school schedule I can only imagine what people would say.

Have You Noticed?

That Welfyville is always near the ocean?  Well, it is. 

Test Questions

I spent the past three days writing test questions for the science end-of-year assessments.  It sounds kind of easy.  It was HARD.  I mean REALLY HARD.  I've written to a prompt before.  This was the mother of all prompts.  We had to write a question that assessed the content, that gave some information about how students were doing with the intended learning outcomes, and that wasn't too hard or too easy for fifth graders.  Oh boy. 

It was an incredible experience.  The other teachers were there because they really wanted to be and the group I was with was intelligent, creative, and funny.  Even working hard from 8:30 am to after 4 each day I was able to write only 12 good questions.  Others wrote more, but 12 was average.  It doesn't sound like much when you realize that was only four questions per day.  But it really did take that long to come up with questions that met all the criteria.

I'm proud of the work we did.  We won't see any of these questions on a test until 2011 or 2012 at the earliest.  Still, it was incredibly interesting and I get to go back tomorrow to try writing questions that use flash graphics.  FUN!