Teaching+with+Tech+Week+5

This week’s most helpful lesson was the reading from “Web 2.0: New schools, new tools”. I stated in my final word how I have been incorporating technology into my lessons to teach, but have not done a lot with assessments. Most senior teachers and administrators push for us to assess the student’s in the same format that TAKS is set up. This way they get familiar with it. The reading stated that this is comparable to putting “new wine into old bottles.” ( Solomon & Schrum, 2007) This got me thinking that the students have been fed “TAKS” style testing since Kindergarten. If I was to assess using creativity and technology combined, they are still demonstrating they understand the concept. Since they are being allowed to be creative they will be more into the lesson and will probably get a better understanding of the concept. The reading also talked about educators working more closely together to create lesson plans. This way lessons can be incorporated with other subjects. Such as reading about Science in Reading class or using Science experiment results in a Math lesson. Assessments can then be done using technology. Each of the teachers can view the other classrooms work and grade a certain part. “If educators work together to plan their instruction and simultaneously plan ways to evaluate throughout the unit, they will develop a wide variety of interesting models.” (Solomon & Schrum, 2007) Overall this reading gave me the most ideas to incorporate into my classroom. It had good examples on how to use blogs, wiki’s, and assessments using technology.

Reference:

Solomon, G., & Schrum, L. (2007). // Web 2.0: New tools, new schools. // Eugene  , OR   : International Society for Technology in Education.