In conducting two new workshops for school leaders called Assess Yourself, and  iPad for Assessment, we have discovered an interesting approach to ascertaining just how students are using technology in your school. It's called a Photo Learning Walkthrough. A previous article in this series, Assessing the Impact of Technology, explained how to use an iPad to quantify the results of a learning walkthrough of your school, using the online instrument Education 3.0 Walkthrough. This instrument provides a list of things to look for, with the familiar four-point Likert scale to measure the presence or absence of each item, like this:

This week's article describes a different mode of walkthrough assessment, using photographs rather than Likert scales. Here's how it works.

1. Set your goals

What do you want to accomplish this year at your school? How do you want things to be different? What do you want to see more of? Less of? What modes and styles of instruction do you want to encourage? Discourage? How do you want students to be using technology? How not? One school we worked with set forth these goals:

• Student engagement.
• Integration of technology.
• Collaborative Learning.
• Joy in learning.

So you see that these are not summative goals, but process goals. A summative goal might be, 50% of our students get in to the college of their choice, or 50% of our students score above average on the state test. These kinds of summative goals can't be approached through a learning walkthrough. Nor can these kinds of goals be accomplished without careful attention to the kinds of process goals listed above. Our undue attention to a small subset of summative goals over the last few years has drawn our attention away from the day-to-day processes that really make a difference. So set some goals that you can see and hear in the hallways and classrooms and laboratories and libraries at your school. It's these goals that you will quantify and track with your Photo Learning Walkthrough, hereinafter referred to as PLW.

2. Adopt a protocol

The principal of the school in this case set a standard procedure for conducting the PLW on a weekly basis. Each week, she and her assistant principals would walk through the school, iPad in hand, and shoot a photo whenever she saw students at work. No exceptions -- three students seated on the floor in the hall talking with each other; snap. Open a classroom door, see 20 students filling out a worksheet, snap. In the library, see a student giving a presentation to a small group, snap a picture. The only students you don't shoot, according to this school's protocol, are those passing between classes. After 25 photos, she'd stop shooting.

As long as you follow your protocol consistently, shoot whatever you see, and leave out value judgments as you decide what to shoot, the PLW will work as an assessment device. The school in this case did their walkthrough's randomly, at various times of the day, and varied their routes through the school to cover every place where students were to be found, including on the athletic fields.

3. Walk through and shoot

Follow your protocol, grab your iPad (or your iPhone, or your digital camera) and shoot. Shoot students and teachers at work. Shoot everything, making no selective judgments. Shoot a consistent number of photos on each walkthrough.

4. Quantify

Sit down with your iPad. Make a little spreadsheet with Numbers, like this:

Now, open the Photos app, and find the 25 photos you just took. Consider the first goal, student engagement. Look closely at each photo. Does it provide clear and convincing evidence of the kind of student engagement you'd like to see at your school? If yes, give it a 1. If not, give it a 0. Enter the total points for student engagement into cell B2 of the spreadsheet.

Next, consider the second goal: integration of technology. Go through each photo in turn: does it show the integration of technology into the curriculum? Give each photo a one or a zero, and enter the total into cell B3. And so forth until today's column is filled.

Repeat the process next week, or whenever your protocol dictates. When you've amassed enough data for an analysis, your spreadsheet will look like this.

5. Analyze

Compute totals for your columns and rows, like this:

Now look, think, and learn. First of all, in the case at hand, fewer than half the photos provide evidence that the school's four goals are being met. So, we know there's work to be done. On the other hand, we'd want to know what was going on at this time last year on this same measurement; and we'll want to measure it again next year, or next month, in the very same way. Day by day and week by week fluctuations are not to be worried about; it's the accumulated totals that matter.

And while the photos provide substantial evidence of student engagement, the amount of collaborative learning seems low in comparison. On the other hand, the overall fluctuation of evidence on all four goals combined is relatively stable.

6. Discuss

Once you've gathered and analyzed a large sample of data, do the totals and email the spreadsheet to your leadership team. Project your iPad as a photo frame with the (now huge) collection of photos playing one after the other on the big screen. Ask each of the team to look at the combined spreadsheet on their iPad and talk about what they conclude. Close the meeting with a discussion of what we need to do next to move forward toward our four goals. Repeat this discussion at the next faculty meeting.

7. Repeat

Repeat steps 3 and 4 each week throughout the school year. Repeat step 5 monthly, and step 6 quarterly. The result will include an interesting assessment of your progress toward these goals, and a periodic reminder and discussion that should provoke continued growth.

(To practice steps four and five right now, with someone else's data, connect to iPad Photo Walkthrough.)

You open your mailbox and up pop hundreds of notes. You've set up junk mail to be captured in another file, so these aren't junk mail, although some could definitely be considered junk. There are messages sent to Reply All, which are filled with information not meant for you. Someone's forwarded you a letter that tells you if you don't send it off immediately to 20 friends, you won't receive whatever it is that you are supposed to get if you follow the guidelines. There's an email that opens with a logo of the school's mascot and a message written without punctuation or capitalization. The message is from a student. One of your school's administrative assistants sent an email with an attachment. You open the attachment and see one sentence telling you to announce to your students that team practices are cancelled for today.  There's what looks like a three-page letter from a parent. Someone's sent a thank you for an email you sent.

Does this sound familiar?

Has it become almost impossible to keep up with your email? The problem is not just because of the volume of mail; it's also because of the way people use this communications tool. An email that simply thanks you for your email is nice, but perhaps it's not needed. Why didn't the administrative assistant simply type, "Practices Cancelled" in the subject line or put it in the body of her email? If people would think before clicking Reply All or forwarding messages, you'd have more time for your students.

You try to get through the parent's dissertation and remember last year when you sent a long reply to a parent about a test grade she questioned. Because you didn't appreciate what you interpreted as an accusation, you didn't take the time to think about your response or to realize that a telephone call or face-to-face conference was needed. In haste, you sent what might be considered a not-too-professional note.  The parent obviously didn't appreciate your reply and replied with something not very complimentary about your teaching. It was only then that you realized your mistake, apologized for your email, and asked the parent to come in for a conference. As it turned out, you completely misinterpreted the content in the parent's original email.

With a class full of students, you know you don't have time to digest long emails, so you put the lengthy letter aside to answer later, probably through a phone call.  You look at your mailbox; there are still so many more notes to check.

To control this upward spiral of email and downward spiral of time, think about adopting the EMAIL CHARTER and its list of rules for email. The Charter's rules deal with the fact that it's becoming more and more difficult for all of us to handle the email we receive. You can check all the information about the Charter on the EMAILCHARTER.org site, but here's a summary for you:

1. Respect Recipients' Time. Think about the time it will take the recipient to open, read, and respond to your email.

2. Short or Slow is not Rude. Emails are not for detailed responses. Emails are for short, to-the-point messages. Notes to parents, colleagues, and students, for example, should be no more than five sentences and content should not be controversial, personal, or adversarial. Use email to parents to request a conference, request help with a class project, etc.

3. Celebrate Clarity. Make sure the subject reflects the topic. In the body of the email, "Use crisp, muddle-free sentences." Fancy fonts, colors, flashing animations, along with digital slang, poor spelling and grammar aren't often appreciated.

4. Quash Open-Ended Questions. If you ask questions in an email, make sure the answers can be brief and easy to answer. For more detail, you should think about conferencing or telephoning.

5. Slash Surplus cc's. Think about which people should get a copy. Don't Reply All unless you know all will appreciate the email.

6. Tighten the Thread. Going back and forth through emails usually isn't a good idea. More than 3 emails in a thread may be overdoing it.

7. Attack Attachments. If the text in an attachment is only a few sentences, put the text in the email, not in an attachment. Avoid "graphics as logos" and signatures as attachments. For other attachments, think first before sending.

8. Give the Gifts: EOM NNTR. If the message can fit in the subject line, type it there and follow it with EOM, which means end of message. Then the person won't have to take the time to open the email. If you don't need a response to your email, end it with NNTR, which means there's no need to respond.

9. Cut Countless Responses. Don't feel you have to reply or thank people for their email. Reply only as necessary. Here's an example from the Charter. "Thanks for your note. I'm in" does not need you to reply "Great."

10. Disconnect. Don't overuse email.

We need to find ways to help ourselves, colleagues, and students to begin to follow at least some of these rules. Introducing the rules of the Charter, however, must be done gently, for we don't want to hurt the feelings of those who have written long emails, sent unwanted attachments, felt it only polite to reply that a note was appreciated, or thought their colorful fonts were attractive.

(The EMAIL CHARTER rules deal specifically with time considerations, but other rules for any type of digital communication should be addressed with your students. We'll tackle those in our next column on email.)

The psychometrics behind our current spate of standardized tests stem from the work of French psychologist Alfred Binet, who lived from 1857 until 1911. Binet was trying to find an easy way to identify students who needed special help in school. His first test involved practical tasks that the child would perform with an examiner, such as pointing to various body parts, or defining simple words. Binet's work was picked up after his death by Lewis Terman at Stanford University, who adapted Binet's methods to large-scale testing for the U.S. Army as it prepared soldiers for the World War I (WWI). The Army needed a way to quickly classify thousands of young men, sending the best to officer training school, and rejecting the very worst. Terman developed a multiple-choice, paper-and-pencil version of the Binet test that could be easily administered and scored. The questions on the test were crafted to produce a normal distribution of scores among young American men in the second decade of the 20th Century. Terman believed that his test was measuring IQ, an intelligence quotient, a mental characteristic that was inherited, unchangeable throughout life, and a strong predictor of success.

The questions on Terman's tests were selected in such a way as to produce a normal distribution of scores. It didn't really matter what the questions were about, only that they reliably divided the test-takers into a range of scores, and that they produced the same distribution over time, like this:

Here are some questions from the Army test used in WW I:

1. A company advanced 6 miles and retreated 2 miles. How far was it then from its first position?

2. A dealer bought some mules for $1,200. He sold them for $1,500, making $50 on each mule. How many mules were there?

3. Thermometers are useful because

They regulate temperature
They tell us how warm it is
They contain mercury

4. A machine gun is more deadly than a rifle, because it

Was invented more recently
Fires more rapidly
Can be used with less training