I know many teachers who feel overwhelmed by the pressure they feel from their administrators to do more than they feel capable of doing, and anxious about the amount of scrutiny they are under. I have nearly the opposite situation: I get virtually no outside pressure, evaluation, or feedback. Fortunately, I set my own bar high and reflect on my practice and all that, but I'm sure I could do even more and do it better if I had another pair of eyes on me occasionally, noticing areas for improvement that I don't notice myself. Of course I would take neglect over scrutiny any day, but I'm always in favor of moderation.
Aside from the fact that I have a proven record and am trusted by my administrators, I suppose a major reason for the lack of attention paid to my curriculum and teaching is that my subject is not tested. I have often thought that the day they start standardized-testing my subject is the day I retire, but I don't expect that day to come until after the day that they impose more specific standards and ensure that every school has access to the same level of technology, which is a day I don't expect to come soon.
Even then, I expect the technology would change faster than the testing companies could keep up with it. I can imagine a test asking kids to identify the cpu or a floppy disk, for example. Other potential obstacles include the fact that so much that students do with technology is creative and untestable in any standardized way (or should be, anyway); and the fact that we want the use of technology to be integrated into other subjects--ideally, reading comprehension tests would include an online element, where students must navigate a website, glean information from it, evaluate it for reliability, and post a comment, for example.
Would identifying the usb port be on a separate test? What about changing page layout from portrait to landscape? Or centering a title? Emailing an attachment? Resizing an image? Creating a pdf? Staying safe online? Printing via keyboard shortcut, file menu, or toolbar? Embedding a video on your blog? I got an email this week from Atomic Learning advertising a "Tech Skills Assessment" based on ISTE NETS-S 2007 that can be completed in a single class period. I don't want to use it, but sure would be curious to see it.
What a fortuitous segue this will make to my next post: Benchmarks and Standards!
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I'm hoping to create some tech benchmarks akin to the NETS, but more along the lines of student capability or types of projects completed. For example, I want to be confident that our middle students have posted to blogs, hosted a blog, created a podcast and posted it to the internet, etc., before going off to high school. As a footnote, do you subscribe to Atomic Learning? Any suggestions on that front?
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