Evaluating Technology Use : Chapter 7

Chapter Seven gave me a ton of ideas on how to evaluate the many things that we’ve learned about up until this point. First of all, the book breaks down what makes a technology “appropriate” for use in the classroom: it has to be suitable for the educational situation, it should motivate the student, facilitate learning at students level of learning (should adjust to meet learning level of every student, in my opinion), it must also meet curriculum standards and complete learning objectives (laid out by the teacher BEFORE the lesson). I also thought it was interesting and useful to know the evaluation cycle, which suggests evaluating the lesson before it is taught, while it is being taught (gauging student interest and what parts are the most interesting can help during the next step) and finally evaluate after the lesson is finished. I suppose the main point of the final evaluation is to help hammer out what you should and shouldn’t do next time the lesson is taught.


I’ve learned about authentic assessment in my introduction to education class, and I’ve always thought that it was one of the best ways to evaluate students. It involves putting together a portfolio of sorts that contains projects, written and revised work, student research, etc. As a teacher, I won’t be able to escape testing my students as well, and I would also include tests, quizzes and class work in their portfolios. Authentic assessment, the book tells us, stems from authentic learning which helps students tie what they do in class into the real world, answering that age old questions that students love to throw out at teachers, “When will I ever use this in real life?”.


This chapter might have offered me the best suggestions of things I will actually use in the classroom. In the beginning of the chapter the book says that school districts and Department of Education’s often provide lists of approved software, some sites and districts even offer evaluations of certain approved software. I also think that attending conferences and talking to my colleagues about what their experiences have been using certain programs would be the most useful. It’s hard to read a review on a website and be sure that what they are saying is true, but if you get the information from a school board organized conference or a trusted colleague or even the Department of Education’s website, I would feel much more comfortable bringing that software into my classroom. I also think that the EDTECH mailing list would be a great tool for me, at least in my first few years of teaching. I also plan on using a lot of the information presented in the several project evaluation checklists to create my own grading rubrics (content, planning, creativity, etc.). I also liked the idea of a web scavenger hunt because I really enjoyed the one that we did in class (a lot of those websites I found in that hunt I will use as a teacher) as well as the Language Arts integration sheet; it laid out objectives and actually showed me how I would go about creating a lesson plan for something that integrated technology.