CODE77 Rubrics for Administrators 2010 Part 8 of 10

I warned you these were coming.

Self-evaluation Rubrics for Basic Administrative Technology Use (2002) 2010

A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five. - Groucho Marx

XIII. Student Technology Competencies  (TSSA Standards I.F, II.A, II.B. II.C, II.D, V.D) NETS-A, 2009 (2a)

Level One:  I cannot identify any specific skills students in my school or district should have in order to use technology effectively after graduation to be successful students, workers or citizens.

Level Two:  My district has a well-articulated and well-taught information literacy curriculum that integrates technology into a problem-solving research process. I help assure that my school has a librarian who provide instruction to both students and staff in these skills. Students have a wide variety of opportunities in nearly all classes to practice the use of technology in meaningful ways. Benchmarks for student technology proficiency are written and understood by the staff and public. Our curriculum is based on national standards such as NETS or AASL’s Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning.

Level Three:  I serve on curriculum committees comprised of both educators and community leaders that help identify the skills and competencies future graduates will need to successfully participate in society. I can clearly articulate how technology use impacts student achievement.

Why school leaders need to understand what technology skills students need:

Drill and practice software, integrated learning systems, videotaped lessons, computer-animated picture books, trivia recall games, low level problem-solving and simulation computer software have long been the mainstays of technology use by students in schools. This is also where a good deal of effort has gone in assessing the effectiveness of “educational computing” with poor, or at least mixed results. The use of technology to teach basic skills, memorized facts, or low-level thinking skills, while at times motivational for very young or at-risk students, is very expensive for the results achieved. (My cynical side says this use of educational computing is attractive to administrators who hope that well-designed programmed instruction can overcome the disastrous performance of students with poorly trained or incompetent teachers and by teachers themselves who see it as a convenient babysitter.)

The assessment of this use of technology really has to be an assessment of total student gain of rather low-level thinking skills, and is extremely difficult to do for many reasons  - Hawthorne effect, bias of software producers who may be conducting the evaluations, lack of resources for controlled study groups, etc. Unfortunately, this technology use seems to be currently tainting the attitudes of decision-makers about all uses of technology in schools.

That leaves us with the most powerful use of technology in schools by students - as an information-processing and productivity tool. The use by students at all grade levels of real-world productivity software like word processors, databases, spreadsheets, presentation programs, multimedia authoring tools, e-mail, networking tools, video production equipment, digital reference materials, electronic indexes, and Internet search engines to complete complex, authentic projects is the proper instructional use of technology. Here students will be asked to complete tasks similar to those they will be asked to do in jobs which require using information to solve problems - the kinds of jobs which are both better paying and give greater job satisfaction.

But big challenges present themselves when technology is used on a large scale as an information-processing tool. First, it requires a good deal more investment in time and effort on the part of teachers in learning how to use it. Anybody can learn to operate drill and practice software in a few minutes, but learning to use a database to store, categorize and sort information can literally take hours of instruction, weeks of practices, genuine effort and guaranteed episodes of pure frustration. Teachers must spend additional time developing lessons that incorporate the computer productivity skill into their specific subject areas. Second, the product of such instruction is not a neatly quantifiable score on an objective, nationally normed, quickly scored test. Conducting and assessing such projects require the ability to develop and apply standards, delay the satisfaction of task completion for long periods of time, and acknowledge and accept that conclusions, evaluations and meanings which result from the efforts are often ambiguous. (Just like in the real world.) And finally, students need more than the 20-40 minutes of lab access time per week to learn these uses of technology. That means more equipment and software and making the technology available in more locations (including classrooms and media centers) than if computers are used simply as electronic worksheets of flashcards. This increasingly requires a one-to-one student to computer ratio as our most progressive schools are discovering,

Assessment of this technology use needs to be done less to satisfy a state department, legislature, or academic body, but to inform the students themselves, their parents, and the community in which they live. It means undertaking the difficult task of creating benchmarks which describe student information and technology skills at various grade levels and the assessment tools needed to measure progress toward those benchmarks. It means finding ways to aggregate the assessed benchmark data to determine how well the entire program or school is doing. It means using technology to build personal portfolios of thoughtful, creative work which students and teachers can share with parents; to present worthwhile and authoritative reports to classmates; and to make meaningful contributions to efforts aimed at solving school or community problems. It means being able to determine if the use of technology is making our children better citizens, better consumers, better communicators, better thinkers - better people.