Week Two Assignment Part 2.6 5370

Week 2 Assignment, Part 2.6 Technology Facilitator IV:

Self–Assessment

Learning about Standard IV, that technology facilitators “apply technology to facilitate a variety of effective assessment and evaluation strategies” (Redish & Williamson, 2009, p. 90) has given me the most new thought about what job I would like in the future. Data to me is fun, and figuring out interesting and beneficial trends in data is an important part of education today.

During our action research class, I selected the topic of data for my project. With my mentor Julie Turner, we decided that the study of the program School Objects: Aware would be an interesting topic to me and a help to her. She was in the beginning year of training teachers to use this data desegregation program and wanted to know how the teachers were using the program and if it was functioning correctly for them.

I gained new information in that I had not understood that the federal and state government requires schools to keep such a huge amount of data on students. Because of the emphasis on standardized testing; testing scores, reports and trends are all needed information for administrators. School must make data driven decisions. I had often heard my superintendent husband talk of data decisions over the past twenty years in his position, but I now understood better what the sources of data were and how schools used them.

My personal experience with using student data for this Standard IV has tweaked my mind about what I think I might like to do in the future.

Learn as a Learner

Learning about how students are assessed today using technology was interesting to me. We often think about teaching using technology to provide a varied approach and meet every student learning style. However, assessing student work through technology allows for even more opportunities for students to convey their learning gained. Testing students for knowledge gained has been a standard for educators for centuries. However, in Chapter 7 of Rose and Meyer’s online book, the authors point out that the medium and methods used to evaluate students greatly affects the accuracy of student assessment. Rose and Meyer (2002) state, “the precision and accuracy of an assessment tool is reliable only to the extent that extraneous factors are removed from the equation” (Barriers to Accurate Assessment section, para.4).
This is true for my student who has auditory processing disorder. When first given the IQ test, a traditional verbal test, this student scored a low average 87. When this same student received a non-verbal IQ test, his score jumped to 101. This shows the traditional assessment tool was inadequate for showing the true level of intellectual skill available to the student.

The discussion board was helpful to my performance in meeting the activities required for Standard IV. Several colleagues gave me suggestions for programs and methods that I could investigate in assessment.

As always, my cohort Skype group was awesome as we learned about assessment through technology.

Lifelong Learning Skills

What I gained from learning about standard IV is students are not limited in the way they can express and show how much they have learned on a given topic. Tests, quizzes, and essays are good. However, photo story projects, wikis, blogs and homemade movies might be better at times. High stakes testing has clouded the assessment horizon. As it states in an ETS article, "the goal is to discover what students know and can do, not to create tricky questions" (Educational Testing Services, 2003).

Personally, I would like to look further into the creation of video memory files that document events and life stories. I am sure someone has already created this type of product, but I would like to use what I have learned to synthesize my children’s lives in digital form. My cohort friends and I plan to attend graduation with some walking and some heckling. It would be a fun event to document.

Works Cited

Redish, T., & Williamson, J. (2009). ISTE's technology facilitation and leadership standards: What every k-12 leader should know and be able to do. Eugene: International Society for Technology in Education.

Rose, D., & Meyer, A. (2002). Teaching every student in the digital age: Universal design for learning. Retrieved February 28, 2011, from CAST: http://www.cast.org/teaching everystudent/ideas/tes/

Services, E. T. (2003). Linking student assessment with student learning. Retrieved March 20, 2010, from ETS: http://www.ets.org/media/tests/TOEFL_Institutional_Testing_Program/ELLM2002.pdf