Formal and informal assessments are used by teachers each day to assess the development of the students. Teachers also use assessment to gauge their students' understanding, comprehension and difficulties with the material and methods that are being taught in the classroom. Assessing students is essential to the students' development. Many students do not respond well to standard assessments but it teachers need use assessment to find a greater understand of where their students are. There are more and more technological tools that are available to help teachers assess their students understanding of material being taught. The attachments that have been added to this section connect with ACEI Standard 4.
Teachers have access to many technological tools that help will help assess students. Teachers assess their students understanding and progress using formal and informal assessments. Many teachers are now using Smart Boards and clicker technology in the classroom. Using this technological tool, it allows the students to stay active in the lesson while allowing the teacher to check the students understanding. Pamela Darringer (2012) states, "They come in every day and ask for clickers. They love challenging themselves and competing with their classmates. They're doing work but it's fun” ( Learning by clicker, para 6). using the Smart Board and clicker technology the software automatically finds the results of the students answers. This tool also shows the percentage of students that chose each answer. By using this tool this allows teachers to understand what misconceptions and misunderstandings there are about the material. Teachers can either directly address the misconceptions of the material or return to the problem later on. During class we used the Smart Board and clicker technology for assessing our understanding on APA format. This helped show our professor our understanding and lack of understanding the different aspects of APA format. After each question our professor addressed the issues and misunderstandings that we all had with the questions. This was extremely helpful for both the teacher and students.
There are also many different techonological tools that allow teachers to compare answers and outcomes of assessments. Every student in our class completed a survey to see what learning style they are. We combined all of our results as a class and created a graph using excel. Excel is a wonderful way for teachers and students to create useful and informational spread sheets and graphs. Below, I have attached our graph that we created for our sections learning styles.
Derringer, Pamela. (2012). Learning by clicker. Scholastic Inc. Retrieved from http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3755843