eInstruction’s Classroom Performance System (CPS) allows teachers to get real time data while they teach.  Sometimes though, there is not time to prepare questions or a teacher simply wants pre-built content.

Examview is a digital content gallery.  Over the years it has amassed more than 14,000 standard aligned k12 questions from more than 60 leading text book publishers.  If you’ve opened a new  textbook and found a content cd in the back  then you have the Examview content for that book.

This library can be used to build paper tests or electronic tests which  can then be administered, graded and reported on quickly and easily with CPS clickers.  As a bonus, Examview Test Generator is able to mirror the format of  state tests and can generate a bubble type test which can then be read by a scanner.

For the  purpose of this demo, we’ll  show how you can quickly and easily pull the library of digital content into CPS.  The first method allows you to choose the specific questions that you would like to teach.

Method 1: Pre-selected questions or test

1. Open Examview  Test  Generator
2. Choose “From Scratch” or “Wizard” (From scratch will allow you to  pick and choose individual questions, wizard will  allow you to  choose question types but Examview will randomly choose the questions from the bank for you)
3. If using “from scratch” click the binoculars on the top toolbar.
4. Choose “Learning Series” and then continue  to select your subject area, grade level and content area.
5. Once you click “OK” it will  load the bank or banks of content that you selected.  Click on the check  box  to the left of a question to select it and add it to your test.
6. When done click “finish” and your test will be generated.  You can now print the test or save it to import into CPS.
7. Make a note of where you’ve saved the test.  The default is in the Examview folder in tests.
8. Open CPS
9. If you are adding this test  to an existing lesson then go to the prepare  tab and click on the lesson.  If you don’t have a lesson yet then go to the prepare tab and click new – select lesson.
10. Once  you have selected your lesson and it is highlighted click the “add files” tab.  Browse to the folder where you saved your test, select the test and click “ok.”

Method 2: Import all questions in a bank

1. Open CPS
2. In the prepare tab create a new lesson or select the lesson that you would like to add content to.
3. Click on “add files”
4. Browse to the Examview folder, Learning Series then the subject area, grade level and content that you would like to import.
5. Click  “ok” and the entire bank of selected questions will be imported to the selected lesson.

Clive Thompson recently posted a great article on Wired.com (link to original post).  The article, based on the studies of  Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University.  The conclusion that Andrea draws is that the digital age of wikis, blogs, email, texting and other communication tools has led to a massive increase in student writing.

By Clive Thompson

As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can’t write—and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, sad shorthand” (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?

Andrea Lunsford isn’t so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.

Of course, good teaching is always going to be crucial, as is the mastering of formal academic prose. But it’s also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions. The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision. At the same time, the proliferation of new forms of online pop-cultural exegesis—from sprawling TV-show recaps to 15,000-word videogame walkthroughs—has given them a chance to write enormously long and complex pieces of prose, often while working collaboratively with others.

We think of writing as either good or bad. What today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.