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Many benefits can be found by utilizing
tech for traditional uses like testing. |
Today my students took their first district assessment online. This is something that I am piloting in my classes and across my department grade level this year. Here in New York State, our students take pre-assessments at the beginning of the year, then the same test at the end of the year. This data helps to measure growth of learning for our annual evaluation. Being someone who embraces technology whenever it is helpful and transformative, utilizing online assessments were a natural for this. While regular readers of my blog know that I favor student centered uses of technology and always prefer student created content to showcase learning, this traditional use of tech has benefits that are worth looking into.
Paper Reduction
My initial pilot project saved an estimated nine hundred sheets of paper between my three classes in which I administered this test. In any school district this could represent major savings in costs related with testing programs. My data is only for my class alone. If this project were to take off across my school, (I'm extrapolating here for the 160 teaching staff at my school) approximately one hundred and forty four thousand sheets of paper could be saved (probably more) just on one pre assessment. In the current era of tight budgets and cost reductions this is an area that definitely deserves inspection. Additionally with any paper use comes the associated ongoing electricity and copier costs which are eliminated by online assessments.
The monetary cost is not the only consideration. Environmental costs with the enormous amount of paper use and waste in a school is something that in my opinion must change. Vast amounts of natural resources are used daily in schools nationwide and then landfilled/ recycled. This could be drastically reduced by this use of technology.
Teacher time
Scoring assessments is something that takes time and effort. Scoring keys must be created and checked, the scantrons run and scores calculated and transferred by hand. Once those scores are written someone else needs to transpose them somewhere else (ironically often into a computer database). All these steps are awkward and represent a large amount of time spent on tasks that could be automated or removed altogether.
Testing bandwidth
In order to be prepared for the testing environment of the future, schools today must push themselves to test their online capabilities with regards to bandwidth and network infrastructure. How does the network function with all the students/ devices connected? We all need to be focused on this as we move toward online assessments.
How are we preparing?
Is you school or organization already planning for this shift? What are the main factors you think are important to focus on, is it devices or network? I'm interested in the stress tests that are being implemented and run. Always planning ahead is essential to meet technology needs in today's (and tomorrow's) fast shifting environment.
