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The conversation today so we wanted you to all be aware
of that before we get started. Jose, anything else we need to tell people before we get started?
Jose- no other than, other than if you could just ah, keep the the, keep your voices, ah, down when, ah ah, when you are not speaking
so that we can be sure to capture all of the audio. Thank you very much. So this morning's presentation Digital Badges and Learning Registry: Sharing What We Know
it's a, an exciting, ah, collaboration and an exciting intersection between two different initiatives going on right now between the English Learner Integrated Action Team and the English Learner Support Division
and I know we have some people here from those two groups today. And also the Superintendent's Education Technology Task Force and our Educational Data Management Division.
um have come together with some ideas through their work and uh discuss opportunities to help our local educational agencies in serving our English learners
and all students through some of these technologies before I introduce our presenters so we can learn about digital badges and the learning registry
I would like to acknowledge some of our guests who are also here to provide some of their expertise and contribute to the conversation
First, Mike Lawrence, he is a member of the Education Technology Task Force, he is the executive director of Computer Using Educators, and is a member of the ISTE board of directors and does a lot of great work in this area so thank you for joining us
today Dr. Christine Olmstead who is the Assistant Superintendent in the Division of Instructional Services as the Orange County Office of Education
and from the Mozilla Foundation we are joined by Carla Casili, the Project Lead on the Open Badges Project and Sunny Lee who is the Open Badges Project Partner Manager. So thank you for joining us
today our presenter today is Steve Midgley who is the consulting principal at Mixrun which is a consulting firm for a range of projects and organizations
that provides expertise on technology strategy planning management facilitation financial forecasting and implementation his work focuses on developing technology systems
grounded in the values of transparency, flexibility, and community. He is now a consulting advisor to the US Department of Education in a part time capacity helping to further the work of the Learning Registry.
grounded in the values of transparency flexibility and community he is now a consulting advisor to the US Department of Education in a part time capacity hoping to further the work of the Learning Registry
Race to the Top and the Race to the Top Assessment.
Prior to transitioning to this consulting role he was a special assistant to the Secretary of Education acting as the Deputy Director of Education Technology
Today he is going to share information on the technology transition, this transition in education thanks to technology driven learning environments
and he is going to talk about a project that he initiated called the learning registry
Steve has also held the position of the Director of Education for the National Broadband Plan developed by the FCC
and he has consulted with the Department of Education here in California on the development and implementation of the Brokers of Expertise project
another project we are going to hear about today is as part of this conversation Mozilla's Open Badge Project and the adoption of digital badges as a possible alternative assessment
for student learning uh Steve's collaboration with Mozilla and digital badges the Education Technology Task Force Assessment work group members have become much more familiar with digital badges
I might add much more excited about digital badges and have decided to position this opportunity as a recommendation for the state to consider when developing comprehensive assessment information on student learning
and is one of the great examples of the types of conversations that we can have and we know that students react to this type of feedback because we adults react to that type of feedback I told a few of you that
Last night I walked down the street and back because I was only at 8,900 steps and if I got to 10,000 they would give me a badge at 10,000 steps yesterday
so even for adults this can be very valuable so its my pleasure to introduce Steve for the presentation
I have been looking forward to this conversation and I hope that it will be a conversation both in the dialogue right now as I present some concepts feel free to jump in
I think this will be more productive where we get clarification or if I'm jumping over or skipping a step if you need me to clarify thank you Craig for the introduction
thanks to Jose, Michelle and others for inviting me here its been a pleasure for me to participate in the Education Technology Task Force work as well as where ever I have the opportunity to work with the California Department of Ed
I also want to mention that Carla will be giving some remarks about the badge project as well so it will be a bit of a tag- team up here.
So I'm just going to go through Learning Registry as a concept first.
and then we will dig into badges and then we will hopefully have time for a collaborative discussion
So the two things as Craig alluded to are mentioned clearly is Learning Registry which I will tag as "sharing what we know" and digital badges as "tracking what we've learned"
So this is not an endorsed tag-line I made this up for Mozilla. I can make this up for the Learning Registry since I run that project.
Digital badges something I'm very excited about, there is a lot of opportunities, but I also, I think we all want to, uh, not undersell, but also not oversell
what it is so that we understand where it is appropriate, what it does, what it replaces and what it does not replace, because it is not a
all end solution, because right, there is a number of people working on assessment technologies, instruments, and those sorts of things
so we will talk about how badges can be fit together with those sorts of concepts as well
So first on the Learning Registry, um, I'm talking about the impending Common Core resource desert
So, we are, here in California, among many other states switching to Common Core. I had a meeting in Oakland, Tom (Adams) will know a fair amount about this problem
They (Oakland) have books from 2002 and they don't plan to have a new adoption until 2016 so they are going to be using
standards aligned materials to California standards to teach Common Core and have time marks on SBAC measurement
this is a dilemma right? This is not something that we can just sort say well it will work itself out
I think we are all paying attention to this. Now, it would be great if on the next slide I showed you how to fix that right?
I don't have that slide. That is a hard problem. But I have been working, just so you understand why I'm working on this I have been working on this problem because of this issue.
We don't have access to enough of the new materials, the new resources, as we need it. So there is going to have to be some
melding of old content, with new content, digital content, print content, there is going to be a lot of different components here that are going to fit together
The Learning Registry is something like the clutch place to try to allow us to fit together
some of these different pieces. It is not of itself going to create any content but solving a particular problem. Just like e-mail doesn't solve a problem, it enables you to solve problems.
I think you will hear the conversation that we will have both about badges and the Learning Registry, these are tools that help us solve
problems in the digital space they are not solutions in and of themselves, they have to be deployed correctly.
I have a lot of caveats like that but they are still useful to take a good look at how to deal with them.
There is also other emerging multi-state curricular standards. We will see some science standards come out, uh there maybe other collaborative standards
that are adopted. ISTE certainly has technology standards that may be useful so this is not just about Common Core
but a lot of us are focused on Common Core as you would well know, there is a lot of aligning digital content
CLRN is a specific example in California, Brokers of Expertise has some traction of connecting content in the digital space to now Common Core.
In the Race to the Top states, if I had an influence, I would have exerted it, but California did not win.
But the Race to the Top states that I am working with are investing large amounts of money into
the alignment of Common Core and so my question is "why does that have to stay in that state?"
that's impractical why would we not want that information
that is useful and they are actually spending green dollars on it whereas in California we are doing a lot of creative
financing, right, to get educators moving forward, right, this is a tough time.
We need to leverage all of these pieces, if people are spending real money some where to solve the problem.
We shouldn't have to solve it again here, we should be able to leverage it with what they've done.