+ Tracey Streit Fritch Elementary Literacy Coach Rose Tree Media School District Media, PA

+ Problem 1: Once standardized curricular procedures are established, how can teachers share the successful practices happening in each others’ classrooms? Solution: Demonstrate – from a distance Walk Throughs and visitations are incredibly powerful tools, but we can also harness photographs as a window into others’ classrooms, especially around targeted initiatives.

+ 1)Demonstrating Best Practices: Raising the Level of Student Writing About Reading

+ Flickr They call themselves “almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world” – with the goals of helping users share and organize their photos.

+ Flickr Photostream, Organized by Albums

+ Inside a Flickr Album

+ Student Work Samples

+ Problem 2: When many strong teachers work together across buildings, they often work in parallel fashion, each teacher or team designing and discovering resources on their own. How can this duplication of effort be reduced? Solution: Share them - electronically After teachers work to find mentor texts, they can store and categorize them in a shared wiki.

+ 2) Sharing Curricular Resources: Mentor Texts Teachers identify strong writing mentor texts, then store and “tag” them on an interactive website.

+ Wikispaces Wikis are “revolutionary tools for building communities.” Wikispaces “gives groups the freedom to publish pages that are long- lived, regularly updated, and built by many contributors.”

+ Wiki Home Page

+ Searching for Mentor Texts by “Tag”

+ List Narrowed by “Tag”

+ Problem 3: Teachers are engaged in high-level, frequent formative assessment conversations with their students, both in small groups and one- on-one. How can we harness the power of all of this data? Solution: Store and sort it efficiently Created by a National Board Certified Teacher, the Confer app allows you to create the parameters within which you will categorize your data, and then quickly store and sort it.

+ 3) Analyzing Formative Assessment Data Teachers collect data while conferring with students, then store, sort, and analyze it – promoting authentic progress monitoring and responsive small groups.

+ Confer The creator of Confer calls it “a notetaking app for classroom teachers.” However, the true power of Confer lies in the way it allows teachers a customized, paper-free way to collect and then immediately use student data in the classroom.

+ Getting Started with a Conference

+ Checking on the Objectives of a Reading Unit of Study in Fifth Grade

+ Application to a Math Unit of Study

+ Monitoring Behavior

+ One Child’s Data Entry

+ Forming Small Groups

+ Flickr Wikispaces Confer