| EVENTS |
| XL Virtual Conference Center |
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The XL Virtual Conference
Center was launched to provide eMeeting
services, directed browsing, video
conferencing, and distance education
services for participating OpenVES
Sandbox states and organizations. The XL
VCC will make it possible to conduct
national briefings, training, and
meetings using web based virtual meeting
tools. OpenVES will be scheduling weekly
walkthroughs of the XL technology for
prospective states, and will archive a
number of presentations at the Virtual
Conference Center for greater
availability. A special set of XML
plugins, based on MeetingML, are
being deployed for formal meetings like
Board meetings. Participants attending
the meeting from a distance will be able
to see the same documents, make motions,
seconds and vote on motions
electronically. Special dashboards are
available for the meeting moderator and
the secretary. At the end of the meeting
a draft of the meeting minutes will be
available.
While the XL conferencing
technology will have great productivity
benefits, and will allow us to conduct
much richer online meetings, the real
reason for its development was to give
teachers greater control of classroom and
computer lab use by groups of students.
With the technology, which will be
bundled with the XL teacher tools,
teachers will be able to keep a class in
synch with directed browsing, work with
individual students using co-browsing,
and manage lab usage better by being able
to see thumbnails of student display
screens. In addition, teachers will use
it to create media rich versions of class
activities, capture whiteboard and video
of lectures, and use it for classroom to
classroom video conferences.
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| Only
Two State Sandbox Slots
Remain |
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OpenVES has
successfully launched its
implementation of enhanced and
value added eLearning tools and
infrastructure in the Sandbox
program. These teacher and
student centric tools will
fulfill many of the critical
needs of the NCLB legislation.
Engineered to
support delivery to our
two reference schools and pilots
and prototypes in 5-7 states
and other projects this year,
there are two available slots
remaining in the first Sandbox
cohort. In March state
Sandbox activity begins in
coordination with other Sandbox
programs. OpenVES technology is
also currently being used
in an International portal
in support of the Peace Diaries
II world education program.
The
audience for the Sandbox program
is the states that are seriously
interested in building eLearning
infrastructure and deploying it
at statewide scale. States are
invited to participate with us in
an intensive 6-9 month program
which will enable them to use the
OpenVES collaborative
infrastructure as a tool for
refining their requirements,
customizing a portal’s look
and feel, integrating some of
their own content and tools, and
field testing and focus grouping
the platform to get statewide
stakeholder buy-in. The Sandbox
program will also help states be
successful with district pilots
and prototypes and will support
state efforts to plan, design and
procure the capabilities to go to
scale during the 2003-2004 school
year.
The OpenVES
Sandbox value proposition is that
the core eLearning infrastructure
must be free to states, that
there are millions of dollars of
benefits to states in sharing
resources, and that
sustainability needs to be built
in. Based on industry
interoperability standards,
states will collaborate with one
another in an open sharing model
to develop, deploy, and leverage
other state’s content,
applications and tools as part of
this project.
Cost to
states is $ 50,000, which will be
matched by OpenVES and its
partners, to provide the on-site
training, expertise,
consultation, support, and the
Sandbox hosting. OpenVES and its
public-private partners have
already contributed $ 1.6 million
in hardware, software, licenses
and resources to build the
OpenVES Sandbox.
Interested
states should contact Tom
Vreeland for more
information, to arrange
briefings, demos, etc. States are
also invited to send
representatives to the conference
described below where they can
meet our vendor partners, other
participating and prospective
states, and content and research
partners of OpenVES.
More
Information:
Invitation
to participate –
Announcement
Press Release - 6/02
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| OpenVES
NEWS |
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| SummerMATH Mastery Learning Program Launches |
The school year has ended, but classes are just beginning at the Southern Berkshire Regional School District,
where the SummerMATH program is beginning its first year. The program, open to all 5th and 6th graders, starts with a comprehensive
diagnostic assessment, and continues with individualized instruction, online learning, and project based math learning activities. Designed
to help students remediate, review, and accelerate their mathematics learning, the program will meet weekly during the summer months and
online daily.
Some students will use the program to refresh their learning from this year. Others will use the summer study program to
demonstrate their competencies in next year's mathematics. Those that qualify will take an advanced mathematics program next year in place
of their regular classroom instruction and will be provided with a laptop computer to aid their studies. The program focuses on empowering each
student to excel, engaging parents, and informing teachers. It will also foster interdisciplinary teaching by helping students to see mathematics
in everything they explore in the world.
Superintendent Michael Singleton is pictured above, with Brenda Mathisen, Director, OpenVES Center of Excellence in PK12 Learning, and TS Vreeland,
OpenVES Architect and Chief Technologist during the Grant Award Ceremony at the District Offices in Sheffield, Massachusetts. Ms. Mathisen will serve
as Teacher in the year long program. OpenVES supports PK12 eLearning initiatives around the world and the Southern Berkshire Regional School District
was selected to receive this grant because of its traditional excellence in the use of technology in teaching and learning.
The OpenVES XL eLearning Platform provides the connectivity, collaboration, and content for this program. More than 125 students are participating
in some level of Math assessment or enrichment in the summer and school year 2009-2010.
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| Southern
Berkshire Grade 2-3 Laptop 1:1 Program |
Well into its third year, an exciting program
provides second and third grade
students at the New Marlborough
Central School, in Massachusetts, with personal
laptop computers for use
throughout the school day. Above, Marsha Lamb, OpenVES President, visits with a student in the program. The centerpiece of the program is the
use of the OpenVES XL eLearning platform as a
personalized virtual
learning environment. Early
literacy instruction, math,
science and social studies
content has been tailored by Mr.
William Dunsay to his classroom
curriculum. In addition, students
are using the embedded typing
tutorial, atlas, calculator,
news, weather, conceptual search,
research agents, enhanced eBooks,
Shout! Channel, Writer's notebook, Writing tools, Research tools, threaded
discussion groups and other
XL services and capabilities.
Students take daily online keyboarding, vocabulary, and language benchmarks which instantly show them their progress.
During the Summer months many of the students continued their learning in OpenVES XL by participating in the SUMMERTEK Challenge. When students
received their new laptops at a
ceremony led by
Superintendent Valerie
Spriggs, Principal Thomas
Nadolny, and District Technology
Coordinator Paul O'Brien last year, they
were also each personally greeted
by the 3D avatar inside their XL
workspace. Later in the Spring of 2005 each student will receive their own headset and microphone to begin a new set of voice dialogs with the avatars,
who will be their personal learning assistants.
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| XL Avatars Showcase Haptek Technology! |
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Since the first XL eLearning platform appeared in classrooms over 3 years ago, the Haptek, Inc. Avatar technology has been omnipresent. The 3D interactive avatar
is a teaching assistant for teachers and a learning assistant for students. The Haptek avatars are seamlessly integrated into the XL platform and a toolkit enabling
teachers and students to author instructional dialogs with the avatar makes it easy to publish interactive natural language learning objects.
The avatar can also be an intelligent tutor, an administrative assistant, a research agent, a news and information reporter, and a meeting moderator. The XL avatar
even interviews students and teachers, administers reading tests, gives spelling tests, reads school announcements, reads the screen as an accommodation, and helps with homework.
Haptek's patented avatar technology and its Software Development Kit (SDK) are the most complete and best advanced technology avatar products available anywhere! We thank the great people at Haptek
for their contributions to OpenVES and the XL eLearning platform. The Haptek products also include PeoplePutty, which allows users to create their own avatar characters and accessories. The products are
described on the Haptek website: www.haptek.com. Haptek products make it possible for OpenVES to build next generation natural language, intelligent tutoring, and dialog-based
educational interfaces for the semantic learning web today!
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| OpenVES at NECC-ISTE Assessment Gallery Walk |
On 26 June 2005 OpenVES presented its assessment solutions at the ISTE Assessment Gallery Walk at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC)
in Phiiladelphia, Pennsylvania. The XL Assessment Tools include self-assessments, online adaptive diagnostic assessments, individualized formative and summative assessments, and rubric, checklist and portfolio assessments for student performances and project-based learning. Their purpose is to build and maintain individualized student competency profiles in core disciplines like Math and English Language Arts, and in Technology competencies. The tools provide baseline data collection for research purposes and they create individual learning plans and granular visualizations of student competencies for documentation of student progress and program analysis of the instructional program in schools and districts.
Each September students in grades 2-10 take a comprehensive diagnostic standards-based assessment, which results in a set of student reports and an Individual learning Plan (ILP) focused on remediation of any learning needs from prior grades, which is shared with parents. In addition, each student’s Learning Styles inventory and Technology Competency inventory is updated. In January, an individualized formative assessment is dynamically constructed for each student. It evaluates progress on remediation of learning from prior grades, and achievement of the first semester in-grade expectations. The ILP for each student is updated and shared with parents. In June, an individualized summative assessment is dynamically constructed for each student. It evaluates progress on remediation of learning from prior grades and the first semester in-grade, as well as achievement of the first and second semester in-grade expectations. The ILP for each student is updated and shared with parents to recommend specific summer learning activity.
Each time a student takes diagnostic, formative, or summative assessments very granular assessment data is collected. We start with assessment of achievement of learning standards and the expectations of what students should know, value, and be able to do. Then, we evaluate each student’s over and under confidence with individual performance tasks, we report on the student’s metacognitive fidelity per strand, we calculate and report the percentage of items the student has guessed on, and we report on significant student misconceptions and miscalculations, which may have interfered with their performance.
The results of testing are available in a number of narrative formats and levels of aggregation for individual student evaluation, classroom evaluation of instruction, and school and district wide evaluation of the Math and ELA programs.
From the granular data collected in each assessment we update XML data structures representing each student’s levels of achievement. Competency profiles, achievement passports, and detailed SKILMAPS all play a part in analysis and sharing of student performance among teachers, students and their parents.
The OpenVES booth was consistently one of the busiest in the Gallery and many interested educators took away packets of materials on OpenVES solutions.
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| Robotics Team Wins Prize in First Competition |
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A Team of Students from Undermountain Elementary School in Sheffield Massachusetts won a BEST NEW TEAM award at the Berkshire County Middle School Robotics Competition in Lenox Massachusetts on 12 March 2005. In addition to their first time out award, the team executed robotic programs that not even older winning teams could accomplish. Parents, teachers, and the HS Principal cheered the team on. The team was led by Susan Cooper and Jane Burke and coached by Lindy-Ann Marcel and Jenna Catsos, who are students in Paul OBrien's OpenVES Robotics Independent Study Program at Mount Everett Regional School. Together with other members of the Independent Study Robotics Program, Alice Maggio, Katherine McSpiritt, and Lila Milukas, they have worked tirelessly since participating in a workshop in Robotics Technology last summer. Future plans call for an expanded team, summer camp program and a coordinated district PK12 robotics curriculum.
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eLEARNING
STANDARDS AND XML NEWS |
| NEW Education XML
PK12 STANDARDS COMMUNITY TO FILL VOID |
To
help focus more attention on the uniquely
complex PK-12 requirements, and to
fast-track implementation strategies and
PK-12 Best Practices, OpenVES and a
number of other current OASIS members,
including Sun, Fujitsu Software
Corporation, Unisys, The Ross School,
Cisco Learning Institute, Cisco, and
Computer Associates, have drafted and
submitted a charter for the formation of
a initiative within OASIS called Education
XML. This group will also focus
on creating international registries for
PK-12 schema, taxonomies, controlled
vocabularies and ontologies. OpenVES will
also participate fully in IMS and
wherever else standard setting activity
important to the PK-12 community is
taking place. The Education XML
technical specifications will be
important to the PK-12 community of
practice, because they will fill a
critical void, while not duplicating the
activity of the other standards
organizations.
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| CETIS News Feed |
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| INFORMATION |
| New
Web Video Editor |
New
XL tools and applications
continue to roll out at the rate
of about one per week. The latest
is a web based video editor
designed to make multimedia
playlist construction fast and
simple for students and
teachers. The use of rich
media to support curriculum
standards in the classroom is a
key element of the XL technology
and will play a key role in the
Sandbox pilots and prototypes in
multiple states next year.
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| OpenVES
Presents at MIT3 Conference |
Last May, TS
Vreeland of OpenVES presented a
paper in
Cambridge Massachusetts at the
MIT3 - Television in Transition
Conference. Paul O'Brien, OpenVES
Board Chairman, was in
attendance. The focus of the
presentation and the
demonstrations that followed was
on a new, interactive genre of
television.
Broadband Internet
access, webcasting, streaming
media standards and
specifications, and Internet 2
technology, now make
revolutionary new genres of
participatory digital interactive
television on the Web possible.
It is now easier, in the digital
domain to program interactive
personalized "Mycasts",
than it has been in the past to
program conventional
one-size-fits-all television
broadcasts. We showed some
examples of what these new open
channels will look like at Web
scale as they begin to
incorporate the following
technologies: SMIL, MPEG-4 and 7,
synthetic characters, virtual
sets, automated semantic
playlists, weblogs, webcams,
webcast streams, video-on-demand,
no advertising, no
commercialization, etc
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At the conclusion of
the presentation of the paper, a
live interactive demonstration of
classrooms.tv and the Green
Channel was conducted and the
OpenVES PK12.tv channel was
described. These channels,
premiered at the national
Open eLearning Conference in
Phoenix during march and
will go live with a full 24x7
production schedule next Fall.
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| NASBE
Showcases Virtual Education Space
as an Exemplary Online Project |
Every
other month, NASBE selects a
state initiative to showcase as
an exemplary statewide education
technology project. The Virtual
Education Space (VES) initiative
was selected as "one the
most advanced learning support
tools offered by any state
department of education."
VES
is designed to enhance student
achievement by providing a free,
secure, personalized electronic
workspace for all educators,
students, and parents that is
accessible anytime, anywhere,
from any computer with a Web
browser. The workspace includes
an online suite of integrated
curriculum, instruction,
assessment, and communication
tools that promote teaching and
learning in a standards-based
context. [From VES News]
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| One to One
Computing |
A message becoming
increasingly clear through our
research on the digital edge and
the experiences at TechBoston
Academy, one of the OpenVES
Reference schools is that there
is no substitute for one-to-one
computing. The OpenVES XL
eLearning platform can be used in
conventional classrooms and
computer labs and adds
significant value there, but in
one-to-one classrooms all the
barriers to extreme learning come
down and students and teachers
are uniquely empowered.
One
of the originators of
the laptop education model
is Toshiba. Click on the
"Learn More" button to
watch an amazing video of their
experiences with the pioneering
teachers and students of the Mott
Hall School in New York City. As
you watch this vision of the
future consider the added value
of the eLearning infrastructure.
You may need to wait 15 to 20
seconds for buffering depending
on your connection, but the wait
is worth it.
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