Assessment & Technology-Enhanced Classroom Activites

Honestly, I felt very conflicted after reading this week’s article (and listening to the podcast - but I'll only address the article here). The reasons for my ambivalence are complex but I will try to explain them well despite my uneasiness.

With regard to the article on Google Lit trips, I was concerned with the correlation the librarian made between the apparent intentness of the students with their achieving deeper levels of learning. I don’t necessarily agree that a student’s level of intentness reflects his or her level of academic understanding. While I do agree that a student is more likely to achieve higher and deeper levels of understanding when he is actively engaged in content-related activities, I do not agree that an automatic assumption can be made between engagement and learning. I think that, as ever, assessment of student understanding is necessary to draw the conclusion that learning is occurring. This reading called to mind a student that I have met at my student teaching placement. He is an ELL with limited previous formal schooling. The school is not currently equipped to provide him with adequate transitional or bilingual services and so he is often placed in front of a computer on a website called Study Island. One day I sat beside him and noticed that he was engaged – not a peep did he utter, not was his attention diverted from the screen – but that he was also just clicking random buttons. He was engaged but definitely not in learning: for him it appeared that technology=game and he was trying to play well rather than learn content. While there are many issues with this situation, one of them is the possibility of conflating engagement with learning. I’m not expressing an anti-technology philosophy here; I am, however, expressing the belief that using technology heightens the need for periodic, formal and informal assessments.