WPI hosted the ASSISTments Showcase October 3, 2011, and over 100 guests came to talk to 20 ASSISTments Showcase Teachers. The 20 Showcase Teachers posters are here. The ASSISTments Showcase teachers explained to the guests the myriad of ways they use ASSISTments in the their classrooms. Look at the photos below and you will see the variety of messages teachers shared.
ASSISTments has a large set of features, and few teachers use all the different features, so we distributed this directory of Use Cases and Features used by the different teachers.
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| The president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Dr. Dennis Berkey, welcomed the many school leaders, and state officials to the event before introducing Professor Neil Heffernan.
| Professor Heffernan announced that the number of districts, schools and students using ASSISTments had doubled this year with over 100 districts, 200 teachers and 20,000 students in 2010-11. See the rest of the slides here.
| Over a hundred superintendents, assistant superintendents in charge of instruction, principals, and state officials attended the event to learn about ASSISTments. To learn what we recommend Principals to do, visit here.
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| Adrianne Morris of Natick explaining to Former Commissioner David Driscoll how she used ASSISTments.
| Principal Richard Lind of Bellingham, MA, (left) explaining to another principal the steps he has taken for school-wide adoption of ASSISTments. To learn what Dr. Heffernan suggests for school leaders to do, visit here.
| Jen Dufault (right) explains ASSISTments' Parent Notification system. Dufault worked with WPI to evaluate the system in which the teacher controls the emails that go to every parent. Among other benefits, parents get to see if and when their child did their homework. This study showed that Parent notification leads to better homework completion rates.
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| Eric Simoneau of Boston Latin School writes all of his own ASSISTments for his AP Stats class. This feature of authoring your own ASSISTments is documented here. (See Simoneau's web site.)
| Julie Schoeldfeld, a middle school math teacher in Sudbury, learned to use ASSISTments by using the online resources. See the feedback it gives students.
| Principal Lisa Houlihan explained to guests how she has scheduled time for teachers to look at data from common assessment. (Listen).
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| Kim Moran and John Bastien (left) are teaching a class for the French River Collaborative for teachers on how to use ASSISTments. They are shown here talking to two teachers new to ASSISTments who attended one of our training events later that week!
| Andrew Burnett has been hired by his district to teach a class on ASSISTments for teachers. Andrew also writes his own skill builders. Go here to learn about skill builders. Barbara Plonski of the MMSI project is on the right.
| Courtney Mulcahy assigns ASSISTments for nightly homework. She participated in a peer reviewed study that showed students learned more using ASSISTments compared to the traditional routine of students waiting until the next day. (Listen)
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| Michele Bigelow teaches high school math and has a classroom set of iPads that allow her to use ASSISTments in ways similar to "Clickers" by getting instant responses from students. Better than clickers, students also get tutoring as they go.
| Barabara Delaney, a 6th grade math teacher in Bellingham, MA, says "My students are doing homework on ASSISTments every night now, beginning each class viewing reports with students, working on problems from the reports. This routine is driving my instruction. I wonder 'HOW did I do this before?' Did I just hope I was on target?" (Listen)
| Sandy Denny is a 7th grade teacher in Westborough. She has taught district classes to other teachers in her district. (Listen).
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| Christine O'Connor explained how she uses the support for open ended questions. (Listen).
| Donna Lee Tingor explained how she set up accounts for the special education teachers at her school so they can see data for their students and use the system to differentiate instruction.
| Andrew Burnett explained how he uses the Data Driven Features that allow him to assign re-takes only to students who do poorly on a assessment and an enrichment assignment to the others. This is an example of how you can use ASSISTments to Response to Intervention(RTI). (Listen.)
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| Jack Taylor, PhD, is a retired WPI alumni who is volunteering his time to create calculus and middle school math ASSISTments content. Mary Fowler, a statistics professor at Worcester State is managing content creation and uses ASSISTments in her stats classes.
| Janet Duggan (center) has put the school's common end of unit tests on ASSISTments and has also constructed folders of assignments on ASSISTments for each unit in 6th grade. This leadership role helps the other teachers get started with ASSISTments.
| Leena Razzaq earned her PhD at WPI. She presented her research on student learning. The papers can be found on our research page.
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| ASSISTmetns Developer Cameron Betts discusses science micro worlds with teacher Robin Scarrell of Forrest Grove Middle School in Worcester.
| These are just two of the 17 undergraduate students doing research projects with ASSISTments this year. Over 100 undergrads have spent a year working on ASSISTments since 2003. Paul (left) is working on integrating Facebook with ASSISTments.
| Kim Theinpont is a teacher at Grafton Middle School who is now applying to do a PhD in Learning Sciences at WPI. (Listen)
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