Welcome to my blog!

This blog has been started as an assignment for my Assessment in E-Learning course. Assessment is the backbone of education - it's where learning starts and ends and starts again. I'm looking forward to some quality time reflecting on it.

To begin the course, we found a partner, email interviewed each other and posted our introductions to the rest of the class. Here is the introduction of me posted by my partner, Suzan VanBeaver:

I am pleased to introduce Andrea Schullo.

Andrea has worked for the Wisconsin Indianhead Technical College (WITC) for the past 18 years where she currently works as a Curriculum Design Specialist and she also helps area high schools develop articulation agreements. She has been a Tech Prep Specialist, a Professional Development Specialist, an adjunct instructor in communications and human relations, and before life at WITC, she has had a smattering of other jobs.

Andrea has been married for 21 years and has a son and daughter, Greg and Sammi, both in high school. She spends lots of time at the kids’ activities (football, hockey, baseball, volleyball, singing, ballet, piano, and plays). Andrea has two dogs and two cats. She co-leads the high school Youth Group and she is on the figure skating board. She likes to hike, bike, ski, read, scrapbook, and work puzzles. In the future, Andrea would like to do more traveling - in the US and abroad. Whew…. Andrea notes she’s a strong J on the Meyers Briggs and a self-diagnosed recovering anal-retentive and says “I blame it all on my mother for toilet training me too young.”

Here’s something funny that happened to Andrea. The night before her daughter was born, her husband went out to put some wood in the outdoor house furnace. She heard a yell and ran down the stairs just in time to see her husband standing in the middle of the septic tank, which had collapsed around him. Warning to all septic tank owners, do not walk on top of your tank!

What is special about Andrea besides her organizational skills is that she loves to learn and people continue to entertain and fascinate her. Thoughts about online learning and teaching: Andrea has been involved in online learning for the past ten years and has a rich background in developing and teaching online courses. Andrea loves online learning because 1) the time factor - she can sit in her big comfy chair with a snack and her dogs; 2) she finds tech tools very cool; and 3) location, location, location. Andrea says online learning forces one to think about how to assess differently. She states trying to fit the old-paradigm assessment practices into new-paradigm learning venues might not be the easiest fit. Andrea is a highly knowledgeable and skilled person and you will hear more from her soon!

Ineractive Inventory Reaction:
When learning and assessment activities are designed for teachers and learners to work together toward mastery of established outcomes, it looks very different from teacher presenting and learners trying to guess how they will be evaluated. I agreed with the statements in this activity except for one: Assessment is used to monitor learning. The snag might be in the word monitor. If an assessment determines where a learner is proficient and where additional work is needed, is that not monitoring? I would say this is one of the primary tasks of assessment.