Unit 3- The Changing Paradigm of Classroom Assessments with Technology

In the past two weeks, we have explored a lot of new trend of assessments, personalized assessments, and how technology kicks in to assist with learning in order for students to achieve the best learning outcome. The changing of assessments is about changing our entire approach to information, about recognizing that having content knowledge is insufficient so we must understand how it is accessed, stored, managed, retrieved, and manipulated. The changing nature of educational goals; the relationship between assessment and teaching and learning, and the limitations of the current methods of recording performance and reporting credit are the three factors that demand the assessment reform.

While we are used to backward design assessment, new trend of assessments enable students and teachers to use assessment for learning. Authentic assessment, real-time assessment, peer assessment, as well as self assessment come in different forms to support learning from different perspectives. When classroom assessments can be simply a "do now", a survey, a quiz or an essay, we utilize various types of assessment to make sure we are meeting different student needs everyday, and think about different ways they learn. Using adaptive techniques for testing is more convenient, precise, reliable, and allow teachers to understand the needs of their students and tailor their instruction to students who need it the most, yet funding for computer adaptive test and its support can be rather limited.

I am excited about my learning of all the technology tools introduced (Socrative, GoFormative, Kahoo, etc) to make assessment more fun. I personally have used Kahoot, EdPuzzle, Plickers, Playposit, Flipgrid, Quizlet... and what I love about them is that they fully engage the groups I had and they were not afraid of assessments anymore, and in the meantime I can still achieve fast data collection, and it's convenient for me to prepare instruction materials.