Two Monroe High School foreign language teachers, along with their students, are making their small screen debut this month in a new professional development series airing on Wisconsin Public Television.
Spanish teacher Lisa Hendrickson and German teacher Karen Fowdy are featured in the "World Language Assessment: Get in the Mode!," a multimedia resource for foreign language teachers. It is a project of the Educational Communications Board and produced for ECB by Wisconsin Public Television.
The series includes a variety of videos, rubrics and templates to help teachers and students use language and evaluate proficiency, according to an ECB news release.
There are seven 15-minute programs in the series, and each emphasizes a different element of student assessment. Hendrickson and her ninth- and tenth-grade students and Fowdy and her eleventh- and twelfth-grade students are featured in the "Assessments for Learning" segment. In it, they explain how they plan their theme units together and discuss how teachers of different languages can plan together for a similar unit.
The series airs on Wisconsin Public Television and on WMVT-TV Channel 36 in the Milwaukee area beginning this month. It is also available on demand at www.ecb.org/worldlanguageassessment.
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Rick Rolfsmeyer, president of the Pecatonica Area School Board, has a message for the next president of the United States: Don't forget about the little guys.
Rolfsmeyer, along with three other school board members throughout Wisconsin, wrote a letter to the next chief executive for Wisconsin School News, a monthly publication of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. In it, he wrote running the country and serving on a local school board can both be overwhelming, and disheartening, at times.
"We are both faced with competing priorities. Yours, of course, are a lot bigger. For my part, I wonder how my school district will make ends meet when our basic, fixed costs rise faster than our income year after year. Out here we don't put as much on the credit card as you folks do. And when you're oriented to kids like school board folks are, it doesn't seem right to stick them with the bill when they grow up. So I still lose sleep sometimes, as I'm sure you will too."
Rolfsmeyer pointed out that many districts in the area can't employ a full-time principal, or a full-time superintendent. He said that while the federal No Child Left Behind law is supposed to make sure each child receives a quality education, "it seems strange to beat up on the schools that need the most help."
In closing, he also quotes Albert Einstein who said "the greatest scientists are always artists as well."
"So please don't forget the critical importance of arts education for all children, all he way through school," he wrote.
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The Monroe School District has a newly designed Web site. Much of the content is already live, but more is being added, District Administrator Larry Brown said. Teachers will also begin to post their homepages, which can be accessed through the site.
The new site can be found at the same URL, www.monroeschools.com.
Spanish teacher Lisa Hendrickson and German teacher Karen Fowdy are featured in the "World Language Assessment: Get in the Mode!," a multimedia resource for foreign language teachers. It is a project of the Educational Communications Board and produced for ECB by Wisconsin Public Television.
The series includes a variety of videos, rubrics and templates to help teachers and students use language and evaluate proficiency, according to an ECB news release.
There are seven 15-minute programs in the series, and each emphasizes a different element of student assessment. Hendrickson and her ninth- and tenth-grade students and Fowdy and her eleventh- and twelfth-grade students are featured in the "Assessments for Learning" segment. In it, they explain how they plan their theme units together and discuss how teachers of different languages can plan together for a similar unit.
The series airs on Wisconsin Public Television and on WMVT-TV Channel 36 in the Milwaukee area beginning this month. It is also available on demand at www.ecb.org/worldlanguageassessment.
n n n
Rick Rolfsmeyer, president of the Pecatonica Area School Board, has a message for the next president of the United States: Don't forget about the little guys.
Rolfsmeyer, along with three other school board members throughout Wisconsin, wrote a letter to the next chief executive for Wisconsin School News, a monthly publication of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. In it, he wrote running the country and serving on a local school board can both be overwhelming, and disheartening, at times.
"We are both faced with competing priorities. Yours, of course, are a lot bigger. For my part, I wonder how my school district will make ends meet when our basic, fixed costs rise faster than our income year after year. Out here we don't put as much on the credit card as you folks do. And when you're oriented to kids like school board folks are, it doesn't seem right to stick them with the bill when they grow up. So I still lose sleep sometimes, as I'm sure you will too."
Rolfsmeyer pointed out that many districts in the area can't employ a full-time principal, or a full-time superintendent. He said that while the federal No Child Left Behind law is supposed to make sure each child receives a quality education, "it seems strange to beat up on the schools that need the most help."
In closing, he also quotes Albert Einstein who said "the greatest scientists are always artists as well."
"So please don't forget the critical importance of arts education for all children, all he way through school," he wrote.
n n n
The Monroe School District has a newly designed Web site. Much of the content is already live, but more is being added, District Administrator Larry Brown said. Teachers will also begin to post their homepages, which can be accessed through the site.
The new site can be found at the same URL, www.monroeschools.com.