Technology

Blending in technology-enhanced formative and summative assessments into traditional instruction and assessment frameworks supports the P21 goal of creating learning experiences for students that mirror the type of tasks that they will encounter in the postsecondary world and workforce. As with the strategies for teaching information, media and technology skills, using technology that opens up the possibilities for assessment beyond paper and pencil to assess student learning is a teaching practice that is in itself, an application of 21st Century Skills. Even the simple substitution of a shared word processing document for paper and pencil or the sharing of a link to an online resource for a paper handout more closely mirrors how students will be expected to express their ideas and share information in the workforce.

While substituting can be an effective place to start when using technology to assess students, the further along the SAMR spectrum toward redefinition that your assessment tools can take the task, the better. When considering how to best use technology to assess students in ways that are modifying or redefining an assessment that you’ve used in the past, it can be helpful to investigate authentic assessment resources or to think about assessments, particularly summative, as performance tasks.