World Health

Publishing Student Work vs Assessment In lieu of its perceived art and science, assessment is a murky practice . Anything a student “does” can be used as a kind of assessment. What the say, write, draw, diagram, create, or otherwise manifest that is then shared with someone else is evidence of thinking. This can be taken as a snapshot–create a video that clarifies the cause-effect relationship of pollution and the water cycle–or something more project-based and done over time, such as a storyboarding, creating, drawing, and publishing a comic book character over a 8 part series that explores the issue of bullying over social media. Either way, because the work is mobile and digital and easily shared, its ripe for both assessment and sharing with authentic audiences in the real world. When students publish their thinking with their right audience or collaborators at the right time, the tone and purpose of the work are able to shift dramatically. The following tools e

You will soon be able to send much longer direct messages on Twitter . The site plans to remove the 140-character limit on its direct messaging feature in July, the company revealed in a post on its developer forum on Thursday. A Twitter spokesperson confirmed to Mashable the character limit would be changing sometime in July but declined to provide more specific timing. The character limit for regular tweets, which is also 140, will remain in place. "You may be wondering what this means for the public side of Twitter," Sachin Agarwal, Twitter's product manager for direct messages, wrote in the post on Thursday. "Nothing! Tweets will continue to be the 140 characters they are today." The move is the latest in a series of major changes the company has made to direct messages over the past year. Twitter introduced group messaging features into the service in January . The network also added an option that allows users to opt-in to receive p