Chapter 10 Assessing Meaningful Learning with Technology

I was looking forward to this chapter. We have spent lots of time in class and in the text finding out how technology can be used to help students and support meaningful learning in the classrooms. But there has been no talk about how to tell if your students are actually learning through the process. This chapter discusses two different types of assessments. One is authentic assessment which is evaluating their authentic learning. The other one is performance assessment which is assessing the actual skills that a student has by seeing them perform that skill. I feel that we have been assessed in this class according to performance assessments. We have received a met or not met depending on weather we were able to complete the required assignment using technology. I agree with this type of assessment. Especially if it is on an individual basis. If you assign a podcast you will know if a student is able to use the technology or not to create it if they produce one and it meets your requirements. I will definitely use this type of assessments in the future since I feel that they do work and show the instructor that they can create the required task. I like the portfolio idea for keeping students work all in one place. I forget sometimes that when I have my own classroom we will not have a class website like we do in our college classes here. Creating a place for students all to submit their assignments and keep them together for later use is a great idea.I watches some of the reviews on the site that was mentioned in the chapter called foliotek.com. This site seems to offer many different options that are useful in creating an online portfolio. Rubrics are important for assessing technology. A rubric is a set of requirements for any particular assignment. As long as the requirements are met the assessment is complete. I like rubrics, they help me stay on track for my assignments and keep me inline with what the instructor is expecting for a particular assignment. There are sites online that can help instructors generate rubrics such as ide.ed.psu/ITSC/RubrProc/ that is mentioned in the text. I would probably need help with creating a rubric for the first time and this tool could be very valuable to me in the future. The student response devices that we have used in class before we mentioned in this chapter. I feel that these tools would be very useful for assessment on a whole class basis. Since they are done somewhat anonymous students will not feel pressured about raising their hand or answering with the whole class looking on. I hope to get a set of these in my future classroom to use for assessments. Our TESOL teacher used a website that allowed her to do the same thing but with students using their own cell phones and texting in answers. That would probably be great for older students but I don't think (or I hope that) my future Kindergarten or First grade students would have cell phones that they can text on and use in the classrooms.