Blog 5- Assessment using ICT

 

There are numerous tools that can be used to complete and conduct assessments through ICT technologies. These tools consist of wikis, Twitter, blogs, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Google Apps, learning response systems and assessment platforms (Kent, 2013). Students can use a blog to post comments and share their thoughts on online projects, activities or information sources. Wikis can be used in the classroom for group or individual research, book reviews and author studies, to record shared knowledge and understanding, change content and design experiments (Kent, 2013).

However, some social media tools are not appropriate to use for assessment tasks. For example, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace would create distractions for students, moving them away from the topic question or task. These kinds of social media are for more personal conversations, where people update their personal statuses and images for others to see. I strongly agree with Walsh (2011, p.1), that unless “Facebook pages and profiles can be configured to provide an appropriate level of privacy for course work” then it cannot be used for assisting assessment work. However, other websites, such as location devices, (e.g. Google Maps and Google Earth) and picture websites (e.g. Flickr and Picasa), are very useful tools to help support an argument or give visual input to an assessment piece. Other social media tools that are excellent for student discussion are various mind mapping platforms, including mindmeister and Popplet, which improve class discussion and productive thinking and problem solving.

Another brilliant tool is assessment platforms, which are an emerging technology that is slowly expanding. It is an online, cloud-based platform that can deliver assessments and continually collect and aggregate information from these assessments. Its key strength is its ability to analyse and combine data, and present useful information back to you in real-time to inform your practice (Kent, 2013). Overall, I believe the use of ICT for assessment would be a very efficient way to encourage students to complete assessments with enthusiasm and gain a broader understanding of the information they have collected and analysed. As a future teacher I would love to learn more of these interesting social tools to help me interact with my students and help them with their assessment through appropriate ICT technologies.

 

 

 

Multimedia Used

 

Blog 5 has only used one image. This image demonstrates the numerous social media tools and websites that can be used to help assist in assessments, projects and collaborative classroom activites. Even though I believe some of the social media presented are not appropriate tools to use for assessment pieces, the image is only displayng all the options that teachers have, when using ICT to help assessment work.

 

Multimedia Reference