Blog # 7 Assessments

How can technology be used for presentation of content and assessment of learning?

The options for using technology in assessment of content is not limited to the following list created by Dr. Cox and crew...

• Digital presentations

• Interactive whiteboard apps

• Info-graphics

• Podcasts

• Websites

• ebooks
• kindles
• Ipads
• Ipods
• Film-making

The possibility to assess through technology is a disruptive tool to the classroom.  Depending on the subject, certain material (say for example story-retells) can be assessed through various tools as digital presentation, podcast, and Smart board tools.  If, for example, my students were to create a digital story re-tell of the class book, I could assess their understanding of the story through their own re-tell.  

How can you implement project-based, authentic, technology-based assessment and still prepare students for standardized testing?

I'm going to steer away from the traditional, educational response on this question because I want to speak from a place of experience and heart.  My students are overworked, over tested, and then given a score that can only build or burn their esteem.  The average scores on these exams district wide are in the forty to sixty percent range.  Therefore, in my opinion, an inaccurate assessment of knowledge.  The systems they use to test are all based on language acquisition and required to be proficient, therefore my ELL and special education students are continuously reassured they are not successful individuals at school.  I will give my students about thirty hours of required district and state assessments.  My students hear the word assessment or test and their hearts pound in distress or for the few who were built to succeed in this environment, theirs is a minority, but they are happy.  I talk to each parent and each child and tell them, your child scored fifty percent on a district exam, but in all actuality they are right in the mean score district wide.  The parents confusion and the child's disappointment may rise when they realize that the test which told them they failed, but is that failure merited, perhaps failure is feedback of bad study habits, exam, or both. Yet, I believe my kids are successful and capable.  And while, in retrospect, I appreciate the data and direction assessments can take my teaching and my class, just not at the expense of the well-being that is so often dashed on the dicing boards of politics.  

Thus, this year I have taken initiative to disrupt my science exams by making them PowerPoint projects.  My students know the material better this year as they create slide shows using actual pictures and words presented in their own unique slideshows.  My students thrive at this activity.  With a rubric by their side, they are free to explore the limits of PowerPoint in an unlimited way so long as the requirements are met.  I haven't seen students excited to take an assessment until now.  They learn, they grow, they thrive.