Reporting and Evaluation, and Technology Use

      Technology is becoming more of a mainstay in the classroom, especially with regards to reporting and evaluation.  It gives teachers and educators an easy access to continual feedback, in respect to student progress and achievement.  Teachers can track student progress throughout a unit, rather than waiting for formative and summative assessment tasks to see if students have understood and applied the learning material.  Given the constraints of the classroom, computers and technology can also provide additional methods of assessment, that allows for evaluation to be accomplished outside of the classroom.  For me, one of the key features to technology and assessment, is the use of running records for multiple subjects.

                                         When assessing reading, my school board always looks to PM Benchmarks and DRA for establishing current and up to date reading levels among the students.  Both assessments are done a minimum of twice a year, usually around October and May.  Quite often, I like to do a mid year assessment around February likewise, to see how students are progressing with their reading habits, fluency, and comprehension.

        From these assessments, educators can establish reading programs to suit the needs of each student, and create guided reading groups that allow teachers to choose reading materials that are at the ability of that group of readers.  Furthermore, many schools use these assessments to create data walls and running records, that not only track student progress throughout the year, but track student progress throughout continuing grades likewise.  This allows educators to work together and identify students who may be struggling with reading, so they can provide extra support in order to catch them up to their peers.

      These data walls and running records have often taken up corners of staff rooms in schools, or can be located in teacher binders for quick reference.  With technology, data walls can easily be created online, for teachers to post and share the results of their student's reading levels.  This would make it easier to identify students who are low or have special needs, then teachers, administrators, and educational assistance can work together to help these students with their reading abilities.  A program such as Evernote, would be ideal for this tracking progress.  Evernote is an application used for online note taking and archiving.  These notes could include formatted text, webpages, photographs, voice memos, or uploaded handwritten notes.  Notes can also have file attachments and be sorted into folders.  This would not only be ideal for tracking reading levels, but voice memos or videos could be included of students performing the reading assessments, and answering questions that test for comprehension.   A more thorough piece of information about reading levels can consequently be saved and accessed later, rather than just a mere number indicating a reading level.

          Another great running record that my school board has been pushing is Dreambox.  I have discussed Dreambox in previous blog entries, discussing the benefits to completing math activities online and helping students to build their math skills.  Since I've started using Dreambox with my students, I have since discovered the benefits of this program with its use of running records.  The program tracks student progress throughout the lessons and units, and even identifies areas where students struggled with particular concepts and lessons.  All of this information can be tracked by teachers in the Teacher Dashboard Area, which gives access to classroom summary reports, student progress by standards (program and curriculum standards), student groups by proficiency, and includes a progress monitor.  Continued use of this software by students, allows teachers to track students throughout the lessons, and can even shape what concepts a teacher needs to cover with particular students, who may be struggling with particular algorithms.

        Here is a video by Cathy Fosnot Ed.D, discussing the advantage of Dreambox's seamless assessment, which gets away from static assessment that has plagued classroom based evaluation for decades.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXGayCdAICM



        Assessment and evaluation, needs to be seamless, and continual, and the use of running records and technology allows for this to take place much easier than traditional classroom evaluation methods.  There are so many ways that technology can be utilized in assessment and evaluation.  In my next blog entry, I'll be discussing ten methods that utilize technology for assessment and evaluating purposes.