In my school we have fantastic access to technology. We have a supportive principal with frequent budget surpluses that allow us to order what we need. One of the challenges I see to using technology to support student assessment in my context is that it requires a lot of time investment in order to see relatively small gains. I have yet to teach the same class more than two years in a row. This is really a deterrent into investing significant time developing technology for a course. However a lot of time is also invested in trying to help students with poor attendance catch up. Perhaps the time spent developing this technology would save time in this area as well.
Students here are often absent from school. They take time off to travel to Whitehorse, there are biannual REMs, trips to neighbouring communities and countless workshops at the school. We also have real problems with tardiness. In this I have found that working to create course shells and then acting as a tutor have been a successful strategy.
A positive part of the small class sizes is that if I am able to organize assignments online then I can spend the majority of the class working with students one on one to offer constructive (formative) comments on their work. If they are stuck on an introduction, I can immediately make suggestions. This aligned nicely to the best practice mentioned by Gibbs & Simpson where students were “…gaining immediate and detailed oral feedback on their understanding as revealed in the essay.” Technology supports assessment in this way by freeing up time for the teacher to provided these tutorials. It would be impossible to keep records of this sort of assessment without the process being tedious and without me seeing the direct result, honestly I would probably drop off. I know their strengths and weaknesses like my own because of the small class sizes but right now in my district there is a real push for having detailed records of formative assessment. I want to try to tap into technology to help make this easier.
In some courses I have been given audio feedback on work. I would like to bring this into my courses as it would help me to keep record of what is being done. My goal would also be to have a visible and strong connection between the standards that I am trying to cover and the assessments that I am assigning. I wonder if having quizzes students could do that would give immediate feedback as to why they were wrong but also that were not scored might also be a good thing for me to try in my context.
Gibbs & Simpson say that the “trick when designing assessment regimes is to generate engagement with learning tasks without generating piles of marking.” As I am working on my Moodle course I am keeping this in mind. I know that the time investment will be challenging at first but that in the end it will pay off. I am also wondering if there isn’t a way that MET students might share their course shells from this program with others, or for teachers in general to for groups and create courses. We could modify them to fit our context but having them started would make techniques like this much less daunting to start in the future.
Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Retrieved fromhttp://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf