Take a minute to think about what you learned and share it in the comments below for the benefit of all GEAR UP coordinators. Specifically:
What is one thing you learned at a session or in conversation with other attendees?
How will you incorporate that at your school or in your GEAR UP work?
I heard a presentation about how evaluation data should be used to revise program implementation, like a feedback loop. I'm interested to see how we can integrate that idea in my work with the school data, in particular the college enrollment data.
ReplyDeleteI attended a session by Wyoming GEAR UP that featured a lot of fun, easy, and low-cost games that reinforces basic terms about college or financial aid. These would be fun at a parent/student workshop to help break up the evening, or play a lot of them at a college carnival. They provided instructions for dozens of games that can be found here: http://bit.ly/gearupgames
ReplyDeleteVery cool, I was hoping to make it to that session and couldn't. Thanks for the link to the instructions!!
DeleteI am very excited to implement the "adopt a college student" idea. One of my team members returned with the idea. We will be attaching one of our last year graduates (currently attending college) with each of our middle school advisory classes for once a month SKYPE sessions. May work that into care packages, letters, college tours with them. Very exciting!
ReplyDeleteI learned how to better use social media in communicating with our students, parents, and communities. I'm going to start Pinterest and Twitter accounts, and make better use of our Facebook account.
ReplyDeleteIt was a great conference, I heard the lunch speaker on Tuesday was amazing! Bummer we had to leave in the morning. I went to a FAFSA presentation and will be using her presentation at our school. Thanks GEAR UP for all you do!
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of encouraging high school students to take the dual credit courses as early as possible so that they realize their capabilities. Then they also realize that college is that much closer since they have the credits to transfer towards their college career. Fantastic conference and great workshops!
ReplyDeleteI attended a session about fun and easy games to use to learn more about financial aid. I will be using these ideas right away.
ReplyDeleteThe question for me is whether-or-not universities will buy into the Smarter Balance results for admission. Will they? Will universities dismiss this and go with their own type of admission testing?
ReplyDeleteI can't say for certainty, but higher ed is at the table during conversations about the assessments and want to be supportive of the implementation of the standards and the tests. Stay tuned!
DeleteMore on the topic of universities buying in from our assistant vice chancellor for academic affairs. She's been deep in these conversations with ODE and others. The hope is that universities will buy into Smarter Balanced for placement, but not admission. Admission has not been on the table as possibly affected by the new assessments. There are expectations that universities will use the assessments to help make placement decisions (this won’t completely do away with current placement tests, for a variety of reasons). Smarter Balanced is not set up to test more “advanced” topics to see if students are ready to take calculus and even pre-calculus. So, because the test won’t be able to “sort” students that way, I don’t think that placement tests will all together go away.
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