Evaluating Students' Use of Technology Tools

Our assignment for class this week called for us to share our opinions on evaluating students’ use of technology tools. When doing so the first thing a teacher needs to determine is what is being evaluated. Is it the technology tool itself, in terms of the student mastery of the tool or is it the actual information that is being presented? (feel free to refer back to my post on teaching technology in isolation). Is the technology simply ‘taking the place’ of another presentation modality or is it giving students access to things they wouldn’t be able to access otherwise?

In the case of evaluating the “tool” there are many rubrics currently available for assessing multimedia projects. Kathy Schrock has an entire page of rubrics to choose from as well as additional links. Learn NC a program within the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offers up a guide to evaluating multimedia presentations as well. Here's even one more link, just for fun.

If you are evaluating the presentation of information through the use of technology, however, you need to become even more selective. There is an excellent article in Edutopia (which subsequently is the focus of a blog on Evaluating Technology Use in the Classroom ) that breaks down evaluating students’ use of technology into 3 categories:

1. Doing Old things in Old Ways (typing a paper in Word as opposed to writing it out)
2. Doing Old things in New Ways (instead of reading about MLK’s famous speech, students now listen to it or watch a video clip of it)
3. Doing New things in New Ways (does the use of technology allow the students to reach audiences they would not be able to reach without it?)

Within my experience many educators are currently in the old things/old ways and old things/new ways categories. That’s ok. It’s a starting point. Technology is not going to become a permanent teaching tool for these teachers if they are suddenly forced to do new things in new ways. A good starting point is to have them move their students away from the old methods of presenting (be it lecture or powerpoint). To see examples of this see a handout I made for our 8th grade students. I say this because a new way of presenting something may spark an interest in the student. They may then become open to learning other new things as well. One difficulty however is getting teachers and students beyond the oooo and ahhh of the bells and whistles and to evaluate the content of the presentation. Here’s a link to an educator’s guide to evaluating the use of technology in schools.