Technology for Assessment

 Adding technology into our classroom is easier than you think! 

Take for example this learning objective for our second grade core standards:

Standard 2.3.4 Obtain, evaluate, and communicate information about changes in

matter caused by heating or cooling. Emphasize that some changes can

be reversed and some cannot. 

Examples of reversible changes could include freezing water or melting crayons. 

Examples of irreversible changes could include cooking an egg or burning wood. (PS1.B)

This learning objective can be fun all on its own, but we can add just a bit of our technological advantages to really bring kids in. 

What if students use a video app on their computers or tablets to document an experiment that they are doing to turn one matter into another (like melting crayons, or making butter) and then edit that video into a news story utilizing a program like iMovie? Not only would their engagement level be increased, but what more might they observe in their experiment if they are watching it in video form upon reflection. 

It isn’t just the activities that can enhance our teaching. We can utilize education programs and applications in order to harness data and information to make our teaching even better. 

Take that same lesson, and think about that formative assessment you conduct half way through to gauge learning. What if we put it online, utilizing a platform like IXL to quiz our students after their experiments to see what they have learned. The interactive quizzes and games on IXL can engage our students as they demonstrate their knowledge. Even better, we can look at that data immediately, already assessed and organized to know exactly who is struggling and where. This data can help us improve student learning outcomes because you will be able to make quick changes or add differentiation to our lessons to help all of our students move closer to and exceed those learning benchmarks. 

At the lesson end we can do the same with our summative assessments, by utilizing an application like nearpod we can build out interactive quizzes and assessment utilizing videos and our own questions so that we can gauge just where our students are. Because you can create your own questions with nearpod, you can really tailor it to your own class and be able to see just how they are comprehending and advancing toward that learning objective. This can help you utilize the data to make sure that the students are directly on target and also allows you to add questions for differentiated learners to further gauge where they are and what supports they might need, which can further improve student learning outcomes.