Technology Assessments

Technology knowledge and skills are an essential part of today’s modern life-style, and although children and adolescents are utilizing these technological skill sets in their everyday life to play video games, text message, interact with Facebook, and check out stupid videos of people hurting themselves or being obnoxious on YouTube, they are not using modern technology to learn necessary information for their futures, nor are they acquiring good technological skills and beneficial practices that they can improve upon in the years to come. It is an absolute must that we offer our students a way to meld their understanding of modern technologies with the knowledge we, as educators, have to offer.

To achieve this end, we must first develop a means, and we must gauge where our skill sets lie in tandem with our students’ abilities. Mary Burns shows in From Compliance to Commitment that teacher proficiency with technology is not necessary to provide technological opportunities to students. As long as teachers have a general understanding of the technologies available to them and their students, the students will meet, and usually exceed, expectations.

The downsides to technological ability assessment is that much of the time, a student or teacher will label themselves as novice or low, when really they are above average amongst their peers. When it comes to technology, newcomers (or “Digital Immigrants”, Marc Prensky, Adapt and Adopt) often feel discouraged concerning their own abilities. On the other hand, the upsides include the ability to better communicate and collaborate if we understand our abilities and how they can coincide with our students’. Additionally, we can utilize the students’ expertise with 2.0 technology tools to better narrow the gap between instruction and absorption. The path we must take to improve is one we must take with our students, or as Mary Burns puts it, “The distance between teachers and students – academic, emotional, and physical – had diminished as teachers became co-learners with students.”