BYOD and Assessment

Assessment is no longer simply a summative tallying of marks and a reporting of grades. Current best practices in assessment recognize that assessment is an essential feedback loop throughout the process of learning, and can indeed be considered part of the learning itself. Integrating this more inclusive view of assessment into a well designed BYOD program affords many opportunities to enhance learning. What follows is a summary of these benefits.

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Differentiating Instruction & Assessment:

BYOD can support individual differences in learning by tailoring the pacing, content, and assessments, to meet the unique needs of each student. Under traditional circumstances this can seem like a challenging task for teachers. However, BYOD makes differentiated instruction easier because students can customize their learning by installing specialized apps to meet their needs. Furthermore, there are apps for practice that can adapt the level of difficulty, content rate, feedback, and guidance given to each user. As well, student can exercise choice about how they access content, be it visual (video), audio (audio books), or linguistic (ebooks). Finally, various productivity apps let students select how they will demonstrate their learning; a written report, a podcast, an animation, etc.  All told, BYOD can make differentiated instruction more accessible to teachers and students.

Rapid Feedback:

Providing quick feedback to students is a challenge for teachers even though it is well understood that this feedback is essential to student success. BYOD teachers can use digital tools to diminish the traditional lag time between student submission and teacher feedback. Such tools include: online surveys and polls to quickly tally results as formative feedback, online quizzes that are immediately marked and communicated to students, and practice apps that will immediately display the correct answer.