Week 7- Assessing with Technology

After reviewing other’s postings along with your, elaborate on what teachers need to know about assessing with technology and/or assessment of digital literacy: summarize main ideas, describe strategies/resources, draw conclusions, make recommendations, etc. Take an informative and persuasive stance.

Last week I attended a rally at the State Capitol with other teachers rallying against too much testing for our students.  This week I looked a little bit deeper into assessment with technology along with assessment of digital literacy.  Assessing is part of our jobs as educators, we teach and we want to see what the students learn.  Lately there has been a lot of emphasis on mandated testing fortunately as I looked at assessing with technology I saw the benefits of the some of the resources that were shared.

Jody shared the “Fab Five Tools for Formative Assessment”, what I liked about what she shared is that the assessments were listed is they took away the fear of students being wrong.  All of the assessments gave the teacher feedback on what students had learned and also let students maintain their privacy which is really important because who really wants to be the one who got it wrong?

Josh shared what he took away from the “Assessing Student Online Learning”.  Assessing can be harder than the traditional face to face assignments.  The assessments can be be quantitative, where students can show what they know and qualitative, where students can demonstrate a deeper learning of the topic.

Cari looked at technology from the classroom to large scale learning targets.  She shared that digital assessment can develop formative and summative assessments.  Assessments also need to be VALUABLE, technology can engage students and help them actively learn.

As I continued to read what the rest of my classmates shared from their readings etc. I was able to see that because of technology assessments are constantly changing.  Both formal longer assessments and quick assessments can benefit students.  We as teachers need to make sure that we are giving the assessments to benefit our students and ourselves as teachers.  Technology is providing us as educator instant feedback, we need to use this feedback to drive our instruction.  We also need to remember we don’t always have to assess to assess instead we need to keep the student in mind.  Our students are lucky enough to be surrounded by technology.  We need to use this technology to help them become better learners and then that allows us to become better teachers.