T&L – Journal #4 – Assessment

http://educate.intel.com/en/assessingprojects/

Initially, I was surprised to find that Intel offered this assessment library at all. After going through the site, I became surprised to find how much quality stuff was here. I find this site to have much potential for benefit for two primary reasons.

First, with so much to do and such limited time to do it, it is unnecessary for teacher’s to “reinvent the wheel.” This site prevents that. Need a quick way to have students self-assess how well they did on a video for class? There’s an assessment here for it. Need an assessment that can help students assure that they are collaborating effectively within a group activity? It’s here. Oftentimes, I find that resources on the internet don’t exactly fit my needs for my classroom. With Intel’s Assessment Library, you can copy and edit the assessments so that they do fit your needs.

Second, rubrics and self-assessments can be difficult to make, from both a technological and process standpoint. Intel’s Assessment tool makes it easier for teachers to create these assessments. And, as stated before, you could start with a similar assessment that’s already been made and modify it to fit your needs.

In my current role as an 8^th grade math teacher, the assessments that I may find myself using in the future are the Collaboration Checklist, the Teamwork Rubric and the Learning Log Rubric. In the future, I hope to get a job as an Educational Technology teacher. In that setting, I would use quite a bit more of the assessments, including the aforementioned ones and foremost among the ones I’d add would be the Products assessments, especially the ones for wikis and videos.

I also enjoyed reading through the Assessment Strategies portion of the site, I was glad to see such attention to different things to assess and different ways to assess it. There are so many facets to teaching, learning and understanding and Intel clearly understands this and the fact that there must therefore be many facets to our assessments. I found that the sections of strategies on the site represented some of the major skills that a teacher must possess and implement into good instruction and planning:

· Gauging Student Needs

· Encouraging Self-Direction and Collaboration

· Monitoring Progress

· Checking for Understanding & Encouraging Metacognition

· Demonstrating Understanding and Skill

I hope to spend more time with this site over the summer and, through that time

perusing the site, will find ways to implement some of these things into my teaching.