Teaching+w+Technology+EDLD+5364+week+5

This week’s readings included a discussion on the importance of effort and the obvious impact effort has on student achievement. Several suggestions were given in regard to how teachers can help students become more aware of their efforts and monitor these efforts for the purpose of becoming more involved and responsible for their learning goals. The integration of technology tools, such as Microsoft Excel, can be used to create spreadsheets and graphs that visibly demonstrate the relationship between students’ efforts and their achievement levels. For example, educators have the option of finding online resources or creating their own rubrics based specifically on student effort. Such rubrics could be a useful tool in helping students understand exactly what is expected of them and how they will be graded. The rubrics on effort could include categories like participation, attention, note taking, homework, and studying. Having students complete these rubrics themselves would be a good strategy for helping students become more aware of their level of effort, in a very concrete, objective manner. This same software program, Microsoft Excel, could also be implemented to help students create individual charts and graphs that track their weekly grades, which could strongly demonstrate the correlation between their efforts and their grades or achievement. These suggestions and strategies could be very helpful in creating student awareness and accountability.

In addition to technology tools that increase students' awareness of individual effort and achievement, this week's reading material also covered assessment methods and how Web 2.0 tools can be used to assess students' learning. Among the Web 2.0 tools listed, blogs, wikis, podcasts, video conferences, social bookmarks, and electronic portfolios were discussed in depth. In addition to these tools, the readings provided insight on the importance of formative assessments used to monitor student progress. Several examples of formative assessment were included in the videos, as well. Particularly, the implementation of gaming was reviewed and how effective this technique can be when assessing students' abilities. This form of assessment seems to be very beneficial to students because there is immediate feedback, rather than the traditional delayed response time from the teacher. It is clear that the direction of education must change as far as tools used for instruction and assessment methods.