Assessment Reflections

I've really learned a lot in this class. The biggest concept, I think, is that so many applications that I never thought of "in that way" can be used as an assessment option in the online setting. In addtion, the vast majority of those assessment applications force the student to work at a high level of Bloom's Taxonomy, which means less likelihood of plagiarism as well as letting the student build new scaffolds for their learning.

I found this link which does a really nice job of breaking down the roles of learning, teaching, and assessing in school and how they intertwine with each other. Everyone has a role to play--which ties nicely into the theme of this post--how online assessments require students to play an active role in their own learning. Whether it's discussion boards, applications, wikis or blogs, online assessing forces the student to create their own new knowledge, which in my opinion, is real learning.

Working on the Final Project

This has been a week for "challenges." First I had a huge writer's block! I knew what I wanted to do for my project, but getting it on paper was not as simple as it should have been. Then, I switched Internet providers, and the transition was not nearly as easy as it should have been. So, my access to working on the final project was not as simple as I'd liked. I finally got my Internet issues figured out on Tuesday, only to discover that the video card on my computer was failing! I quickly saved my work so far to a thumb drive, but I had to wait until I could get computer access to do anything. So, it's been an intense last couple of days trying to get caught up!

Actually, my challenges this week have made me think about my potential students. Teachers who will be taking this class could be total technology newbies, and challenges such as I endured this last week would not make them excited about incorporating technology into the classroom! Hopefully, I've designed this course and the assessments in it to be as user-friendly as possible!

Kathy