What should we be assessing?

With a heads up from David Warlick, I just posted some thoughts to Rob Darrow's blog. He's a librarian who will be attending the 21st Century Literacies Impact Conference at U.C. Berkley, co-sponsored by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. He poses an interesting question for us edubloggers: "What is an assessment example in a school or school system that supports 21st century learning?"

That's a hard one. That didn't stop me from taking a shot.

As I was trying to write something halfway intelligent, I got to thinking about how difficult it is going to be to encourage 21st Century learning skills and find the proper, most appropriate ways to assess them if teachers are unwilling themselves to discover ways of using these same digital tools and strategies. How do we as teachers keep up ourselves? And I don't mean those of us on my bloglines or reading this now, but the others in the faculty room who are just now adjusting to e-mail. This is by no means a groundbreaking discovery, but it's part of my learning process.

Check it out yourself and post a comment on his blog. Or mine.