No longer do teachers need to lug heavy satchels full of misaligned, yet stapled papers home to grade or stay late at school to mark all of the bristol board projects that take up the entire room. The nature of assessment has changed thanks in part to 21st century tools and the internet.
The Growing Success document outlines the 7 fundamental principles of assessment. These are key components required to ensure that all the players (teachers, students and parents) are able to work together to help students progress through the school year. Technology has improved many aspects of these principles. for instance, more than the simple physical relief of having worked shared over email or connected tools like Google Apps for Education, 21st century tools have levelled the playing field. Students with gross or fine motor issues can use speech to text, students with low vision can use a variety of filters or text to speech to listen to a text. Students who require writing tools like picture dictionaries or visual cues or timers can not complete appropriate grade level tasks using technology to be assessed the same way as the average student.
Providing students with timely and meaningful feedback on their assessment tasks is also made much quicker ensuring that the amount of lag time between physically submitting rough work . Google Classroom has taken this even one step further, allowing the teacher to see at a glance which assignments have been turned in and who is struggling. Being able to create and store digital portfolios or maintain key assessment samples from previous years, now becomes far more manageable as well. This in turn can help students develop their self-evaluation skills, goal setting and their sense of accomplishment!
Communicating with parents about their child's progress or about the progress of the entire class through a particular project has also improved. With the use of Social media, blogs, tweets, emails and websites are keeping parents and students up to speed. No more excuses -everything needed is posted.
We keep coming back to this document! Growing Success outlines everything so well for assessments and it does seem like we are moving forward with reporting. Several teachers here are in the habit of handing out large packages of work, having students return it, then spending weekends marking it. I cannot learn this way myself, why would I want to subject my students, who have already gone this route, to the same procedures that failed them once before? Innovative teachers need innovative tools and our department needs to wake up and try something new!
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