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Spring/Summer-08

TASKSTREAM: ONLINE TOOLS HELP WITH PLANNING, ORGANIZING AND MANAGING PROGRAM EVALUATION, LEARNING OUTCOMES, ASSESSMENT AND ACCREDITATION PROCESSES
TaskStream today is a company that has parlayed more than a decade of its experience creating instructional design, lesson-plan-building, performance assessment, curriculum management and eportfolio tools to a new level of products and services that focus on accountability and learning. MORE

UNCW WATSON SCHOOL OF ED ONE OF MANY IN THE FIELD ADOPTING EPORTFOLIOS
Like many schools and colleges of education, the Watson School of Education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) has transitioned over to requiring all of its student teacher candidates seeking initial licensure to create eportfolios. These UNCW students use the TaskStream LAT to maintain what’s called a "Foundations Portfolio," which is basically an electronic compilation of selected work from each of their foundations courses. TaskStream is also used later in their academic programs as a tool for gathering evidence of their work in meeting performance standards, and it becomes part of their exit requirements from the Watson School of Education. MORE

HOW LIVETEXT HELPS HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS
MANAGE AND AUTOMATE ACCREDITATION PROCESSES
LiveText is a provider of a flexible, multi-faceted accreditation management system for developing, assessing and measuring student learning. Co-Founder Robert Budnik talks about how this company has grown to offer a suite of tools that addresses six guiding principles for accreditation. MORE

LIVETEXT RESPONSIVE TO TEACHER EDUCATION COMMUNITY NEEDS
Lance Tomei is Director for Assessment, Accreditation, and Data Management at the University of Central Florida (UCF) College of Education. He took a close look at LiveText in 2002 when he attended the company’s first annual Collaboration Conference held in Chicago. He says he attended the conference in order to hear what users had to say about LiveText technology, as well as to get an understanding of what kind of reputation the company had established as an organization. MORE

CBU INCREASES USAGE OF LIVETEXT FOR MANAGING WASC ACCREDITATION AND BUILDING AN ASSESSMENT CULTURE
California Baptist University (CBU) English Professor DawnEllen Jacobs is also Associate Provost and an Accreditation Liaison Officer at CBU. She has been a user of LiveText for seven years. "Their customer service hooked us," Jacobs says in reference to CBU’s decision to adopt LiveText back in 2001. "What we have seen since then is just a continuation of that service. We have been very pleased with their responsiveness. What has kept us with LiveText is their ability to grow with us. They are responsive to their constituents’ needs and have adapted their product to fit what we need to do." MORE

DIGICATION MAKING HEADWAY IN HIGHER ED EPORTFOLIO MARKETPLACE
Digication is a web-based eportfolio software company that was created by two art educators, Jeffrey Yan and Kelly Driscoll, both graduates of and faculty members at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), noted as one of the top art schools in the country. Driscoll and Yan also have extensive backgrounds in web application development, user interface design, and digital media, so it makes sense that they have created an eportfolio product and service that has become highly regarded for its ease of use; great-looking, customizable and intuitive interface; and its strong capability to easily store and display complex digital images and video files. Driscoll and Yan also have a strong community-building, social-networking, Web 2.0 kind of mindset that is helping to steer their product down interesting and highly creative educational pathways. MORE

HOW CHALK AND WIRE HELPS COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES BUILD MULTIPLE LEVELS OF
PERFORMANCE-BASED ASSESSMENTS
The first in our series on electronic portfolio vendors . . . Chalk and Wire is more than a provider of electronic portfolio software. It also helps institutions implement assessment systems with sophisticated analysis and reporting features and functions that have been utilized for accreditation management processes. See how Chalk and Wire started and grew. Several institutions explain how the collaborative relationship they have experienced with this modern company, with a usability, learner-based and assessment-focused mindset, has helped them move forward in building out a culture of evidence. MORE

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CRITICAL ASSESSMENT AND LEARNING
"The clients we look for are people who are genuinely interested in the performance of their students," says Chalk and Wire Founder and CEO Geoff Irvine. They also understand the importance of accreditation, can identify what they already do well, and are willing to accept that there are some things that they do not do so well and need to fix for the sake of their students. "My bottom line is if you commit to assess, you commit to act," Irvine adds. "If you are not going to be prepared to act, don’t bother doing it - which is why we take no more than only 20 clients a year." MORE

A RELATIVELY SMALL COMPANY BUILT ON RELATIONSHIPS
Since Chalk and Wire officially became a Canadian corporation in 2000, which was after its research and development phase with Canada’s Communications Research Centre, it has grown to more than 300 clients today with a total of about 180,000 users, and still growing. MORE

UNDERSTANDING EDUCATION SYSTEMS GLOBALLY: Perspectives From and On the Directorate for Education at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
An in-depth special report about the Directorate for Education Department inside the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), featuring perspectives from leadership at the Directorate and from higher education professionals in the U.S. from WICHE, NCHEMS, the World Bank, CONAHEC, Blackboard and the University of Massachusetts. MORE

THREE BROAD QUESTIONS FOR ANDREAS SCHLEICHER
Head of the Indicators and Analysis Division for OECD's Directorate of Education, Andreas Schleicher, talks briefly about trends, inefficiencies and changes within the education sector globally. MORE

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