Tag Archives: Michigan Assessment Consortium (MAC)

2014/08/08 (F) Decked Out

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Today was the first day in over a month that we did not have contractors at the house, were not wondering why we did not have contractors at the house, or were not working on projects getting ready to have contractors at the house.  I like working on projects, but today was a deep breath day for both of us.  The weather was near perfect so we both spent much of the day on the rear deck where we made great use of our table and sun shade umbrella.

We had breakfast, lunch, and dinner on the deck, a first since we moved here.  Linda read there, and I worked at my computer there during the afternoon and early evening.  At one point our male cat, Jasper, was sitting by the dining room doorwall crying for us to come in and pay attention to him.  Instead, Linda put him in his carrier and put it on the table.  I don’t think he was comfortable at first, but he was near us and seemed to like being “outside” and able to look around.  At least he stopped crying.  Linda got online, found a “kitty tent” on Amazon that we liked, and ordered it.  It’s a 5′ x 6′ tent that folds up and stores like a backpacking tent.  All of the sides and the floor are nylon screen mesh.  It has a zipper door.  It should be here on Monday.

I worked at my desk all morning and finished up the test items I was writing for the Lectora version of the Michigan Assessment Consortium professional development series on Common Assessment Development.  I got the items e-mailed off to the MAC and to Bill at Wayne RESA and e-mailed an invoice to the Kathy, the president of the MAC.  Linda spent some time cleaning part of the house; she’s been doing a little bit each day.

The high point of the day was a low altitude flyover by five World War Two vintage aircraft from the Yankee Air Force based at Willow Run Airport in Ypsilanti about 40 miles SSE of our house.  They came directly over our house in a V-formation banking to the left and heading south.  A B-17 bomber (4-engine) was at the point with a P-38 and a P-51 fighter on either side and two additional fighters at the tips that I could not identify.  We heard them coming from some distance away and the sound was as impressive as the sight as they passed overhead.  Linda checked online and discovered there was a major air show tomorrow at Willow Run Airport so we surmised they were on a practice flight.

For dinner, Linda made sweet potatoes topped with a mixture of black beans, tomatoes, onions, and several spices.

 

2014/07/24 (R) Back To Work

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We were up earlier than normal.  Linda went into the bakery today and likes to be on the road ahead of the worst of the morning traffic rush.  Since she was working I figured it was a good day for me to also do some paid work (plus a couple of loads of laundry).  Earlier in the summer I agreed to write assessment items for some of the modules in the Michigan Assessment Consortium professional development series on Common Assessment Development.  The items are needed for use with the Lectora platform, which Bill Heldmyer at Wayne RESA is using to re-package the modules.  These are modules that other team members developed, so I have to spend some time with the content before I can write the items.

I did some work on this in June and then got busy with contractors and out-of-town trips.  I am still tied up with construction, contractors, and other projects but a timely completion for this work would be early August so I spent much of today working on it.  I already had one module done and hoped to finish the other six but only managed to complete three of them.  I am anxious to get back to work on the HVAC prep in the garage but I plan to continue working on the assessment items tomorrow as I would like to e-mail them to the team for feedback before the end of the day.

I have a lot going on at the moment.  I like being busy, but this is starting to feel like “work.”  I have a growing list of “must do” bus projects that I have yet to start:  1) fogged window replacement; 2) auxiliary air filter / water separator replacement; 3) Aqua-Hot expansion reservoir replacement; 4) Aqua-Hot exhaust leak repair; 5) motorized windshield shade repair; 6) finishing the installation of the ZENA power generator (for charging the house battery bank while driving), and; 7) redoing the water bay (that’s a big one).  I have an optional project to replace the rear view camera system.

Butch is building new ride height linkages for his bus and wants to build some for me as well, so that makes nine “bus projects” I would like to accomplish before the weather turns too cold to work outside.  Some of these are projects I can do with the bus in front of the house once I can move it back into its normal parking spot.  The rest are things I will work on once I get it down to Butch and Fonda’s place in Twelve Mile, Indiana, probably this September.

The FMCA education committee work is ramping up and I have three websites I am trying to launch, one of which has an August 11 target date, plus our own website/blog to maintain (as of this writing I am over two weeks behind on blog posts).  I am also supposed to be writing a “featured bus” article for Bus Conversion Magazine on Marty and Pat Caverly’s MCI MC-5B conversion “Scooby Doo & Bookworm.”  It’s a great conversion that has taken 20 + years to build and will be the cover/centerfold story when it is published.  I have 1,500 photos from Marty and the only way I will make sense of the project is to sit down with Marty, select images, and make notes.  Once I have a sense of the chronology of the work, and the images to illustrate it, I can weave the words together to tell the story.

Kyle and Spencer were here working on the landscaping for most of the day.  Steve stopped by in the morning to go over the work from yesterday and outline the work for today.  It’s coming along, albeit much more slowly than I think it should.  For a job that requires a lot of manual labor we normally only have two guys on site, sometimes three and sometimes only one.  And, sad to say, they simply do not work as hard and as persistently when Steve is not here.

Linda got home ahead of the afternoon traffic.  We had leftover potato and lentil curry and naan for dinner and both the dish and the bread were still excellent.  A few black grapes and dark, sweet cherries for desert and we were off to bed early.

 

2014/05/06 (T) RESA Redux

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While we were in Florida I spent a little time working on an extension of a project I was deeply involved in the couple of years prior to my retirement.  The Michigan Assessment Consortium (MAC), of which I was a founding board member, sponsored the development of a series of modules for educators on how to develop and use “common assessments.”  “Common” in this case meant “shared across multiple classrooms/teachers,” as opposed to other meanings, such as “ordinary” or “numerous.”  The 24 modules were developed as scripted PowerPoint presentations with learning activities and supporting materials.  They were field tested in a workshop setting and revised based on participant feedback and the experience of the presenters.  The modules were then videotaped at Wayne RESA, with each of the development team members narrating the modules on which they were the lead author.  The videotaped modules, along with the PowerPoint files and supporting materials were made available online through MI-StreamNet free of charge.

There has been a continuing interest in this professional development series but recent changes in the rules for continuing education units (CEUs) required that the modules be repackaged in order to qualify.  Wayne RESA made a decision a few years ago to train some staff members in the Lectora software for creating online courses.  Some staff time became available and RESA approached the MAC and suggested the use of Lectora to repackage the assessment modules to meet the new CEU requirements.  One of those requirements was for assessments that validate the learner’s engagement with the content.  The existing modules did not include such assessments so the original authors were contacted to see if they would develop test items for their modules.  That is how I came to spend some time this winter writing test items.

Kathy Dewsbury-White, the President of the MAC, had arranged to meet today with Ken Schramm (Manager of TV & Media Production) and Bill Heldmyer, TV Producer/Director extraordinaire) to discuss the project.  She asked me to come along, and that is how I came to spend the day at Wayne RESA, from which I retired in June 2012.  There was a MAC sponsored video conference at 10 AM so while Kathy attended to that I roamed the halls of my former place of employment to see who was around.  All told I was able to visit briefly with a dozen or more people and with another half dozen a little longer.  When the video conference was over we grabbed lunch with Ken.  When we got back to RESA we worked with Bill in his editing suite on how we wanted certain aspects of the modules to work.  Kathy and I then worked our way back to Brighton through the afternoon rush hour traffic.

I talked to Butch (W9MCI) on the phone in the evening.  He had spoken directly to International Thermal Research about their Oasis brand hydronic heating systems and gotten some pricing.  There is a real possibility that our rebuilt Aqua-Hot hydronic heating unit in our motorcoach may have a coolant leak and that the leak is in the combustion chamber.  The evidence for this is an excessive amount of white smoke when the units fires up, if it fires up.  If so, it cannot be field repaired and we would have to get a rebuilt unit to replace the failed rebuilt unit, or get a new unit.  At this point my inclination would be to get a new unit from a different company, like maybe ITR.  I have a low tolerance for the repeated failure of expensive engineered systems.