How to help professional teachers share their practice

Reminds me of Josh Tenenberg’s and Sally Fincher’s Disciplinary Commons and our own Disciplinary Commons for Computing Educators.  There’s a real challenge in sharing our teaching practices, making them consistent (where useful, like for grading in this piece), and measuring teaching practices to determine effectiveness.  We know that teaching is really important, but we don’t have good ways of defining, showing, and teaching what makes for effective computing teaching.

A student taking an oral examination can be filmed and their performance ‘marked’ with written, sound or visual comments using a multimedia tool called LimSee3. The resulting multimedia document can be shared so that other teachers and examiners can develop consistent approaches to marking.

This innovative tool is just one of a series developed during the Europe-wide Palette project to help ‘communities of practice’, such as teachers. Communities of practice are disparate groups of people – usually professionals – who strive to define, shape, share and manage a body of knowledge.

via ICT Results – Re-learning how to help professionals share their practice.