Teaching+with+Tech+Week+4+Reflection

This week has been a challenging week but new knowledge has been gained about evaluations and assessments. According to Rose and Meyer (2002), “To be truly useful, assessments must evaluate the knowledge and skills relevant to students' goals and they must do so accurately.” Looking at this statement we must take into considerations the ability of our learners. We have to remember that everyone does not learn the same way, there are different learning styles. How we address these learning styles and present our curriculum and objectives is relevant to how we assess and evaluate our students. We have to design lessons with the intent to reach every learner. Assessments have been known to be created in one style and given to the entire class. But the accuracy of the assessment is not valid if every learner is not able to express what they have learned. Learning styles can be a barriers when it comes to assessments but also media constraints, supports and integrating curriculum with limits. Using print as an assessment can have constraints on learners. Furthermore eliminating the constraint of using a single media and integrating other types of media into evaluations and assessments can give students another outlet to express what they have learned. In addition, we also must give students the appropriate support to achieve goals set forth. Support meaning tools to be successful. Consequently observing students, giving feedback and getting feedback is another way to assess knowledge and skills of students. An example of self assessment is a student journal. This is a tool I use in my Kindergarten class for Science. The journal allows students to make an ongoing connection between concepts by recording their observations. In conclusion because of these barriers I feel that various media types and the UDL framework can support improvement in the evaluation and the assessment process. The media types provide for a variety of outlets to asses students and the UDL framework provides a guide to design a lesson that will reach all learners.

Rose, D. & Meyer, A. (2002). Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age: Universal Design for Learning. Alexandria. VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.Available online at the Center for Applied Special Technology. Chapter 7. Retrieved on October 5, 2009, from http://www.cast.org/teachingeverystudent/ideas/tes/