Technology Assessments

               Technology Assessments

      Assessment means to assess or evaluate. As leaders, if we do not know; what an educator knows, about a new skill or technology; how can he or she teach the new skill to their students?  If we don't know the level of our students skill how can they learn effectively? Because of our varying diverse, ethnic and economical backgrounds; assessing technology skills,  is needed now, more than ever.  While, I was taking the technology assessment surveys last week, I was shocked at how little, I knew about technology.  As I progressed through each survey, I found that I knew less and less. Without assessments surveys; I wouldn’t know, what I didn’t know, I didn’t know.

      “It is common for educators to introduce new technology into instructional settings assuming that it has positive impacts on teaching and learning. However, without assessing, it is impossible to understand if, how and to what extent the technology helps instructors and learners. This is because the degree of impact is determined by how the technology is integrated in the instructional settings.  Our knowledge of the extent that the technology improves teaching/learning is only as good as the questions we ask, the data we collect, and analysis we perform. The assessment of instructional technology offers several practical benefits, all of which support continual improvement of teaching and learning:  Technology assessment, clarifies what you want to achieve by introducing the new technology; Provides information on what works well and challenges; identifies problems; early so that they can be corrected or minimized; Helps tailor the use of technology to foster students’ learning; Informs future decisions for technology introduction. Provides information about students/users’ reactions toward the technology; Guides future evaluation efforts by clarifying what additional information is needed.” (Anonymous, 2007)

      Assessing technology, is a proactive way to figure out, what a teacher or student knows; however, there can be draw backs. If the assessments; are not fair, accurate, or up-t0-date, the assessments are not valid.  If the appropriate data and STaR charts are not accurate, and procedures are not correctly followed; then results can be misleading. In order, for more validity to be present, in our technological assessments; we need formal and informal technological assessments; that can be reported to a centralized system or method of data collection. Once the data is collected; the information must be immediately, put to use for planning, budgeting, problem-solving, and implementation.  Technology can become obsolete over night, staying-on-top of assessment can prove to be a daunting task.  If we all work together; board members, administrators, teachers, parents, and students; we will be able to pull-off implementing current technology. Technology assessments must be the beginning, middle and never- ending  journey to catch-up to our current educational technological capabilities.

Reference:

Anonymous (2010, August 15). Why assess instructional technology? Retrieved from http://www.utexas.edu/academic/ctl/assessment/iar/tech/plan/why/