iSean

The key standard and performance indicator being addressed this week comes from the ISTE NETS for Teachers as follow:
IV. ASSESSMENT AND EVALUATION.
Teachers apply technology to facilitate a variety of effective assessment and evaluation strategies. Teachers:

1. apply technology in assessing student learning of subject matter using a variety of assessment techniques.

This session covers a few different types of assessment tools that can be enhanced with technology. First, I had us look at authentic assessments. Specifically, I choose to introduce you to rubrics and the rubric making site: http://rubistar.4teachers.org/. The benefit of this site is that it is free to use and it makes the development of rubrics very easy for anyone with access to the Internet. They even have many models to help you get started on all sorts of academic projects. I knew about this site because I worked on the Rubistar project when I was at the University of Kansas. If I hadn’t worked on this project and relied on a Google search, I might have searched for “rubric” or “rubric maker” and in both cases the number 1 hit turns out to be Rubistar, so I likely would have found this resource anyway. I did explore many other rubric making sites, but none had the same ease of use and none offered the same level of support and online tutorials.

Another type of authentic assessment that can be enhanced with technology is the portfolio. Portfolios turned out to be a larger topic than I could fit into this session. So my approach to this introduction was to stick to looking at how portfolios can be useful in the assessment of student learning since that is the NETS standard that is the focus this lesson. Therefore, we are just taking a cursory overview of one angle of the topic.