October 2005 — Features

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Tech + Imagination = Results

Inspired technology initiatives driven by one university project are changing the way teachers instruct and assess, but most importantly, the way today’s students learn.

BY CATHY L. BARLOW AND KAREN S. WETHERILL

Just when we think we’ve reached the bounds of creativity in developing technology applications for teaching, the advent of new software and hardware extends the horizon for new and innovative strategies to improve teaching and student learning. Sure enough, those innovations are driven by the educators themselves.

At the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW), a project funded by a Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology (PT3) grant has been expanding the focus for technology application in education, and has resulted in effective and efficient ways to use technology for formative and summative assessments in P-16 classrooms. Importantly, many of the project’s initiatives have used PDAs, newly developed Web-based assessment systems, and commercial technologies. But this latest approach hasn’t come about overnight: Faculty from UNCW’s Watson School of Education and its College of Arts and Sciences, as well as K-12 classroom teachers/administrators and teacher-education candidates from across a three-county school district region (Brunswick,Duplin,and New Hanover counties) have worked together over the three years of this grant to integrate technologies for assessment in university and public school classrooms. Partnering with professional organizations, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction and corporate business entities have further enabled creative ideas to be translated into reality.

Utilizing Handhelds for Real-Time Assessment

One portion of the PT3 grant was specifically written to use handheld computers to assist in the performance assessments required by North Carolina. The two counties, Brunswick and Duplin, that worked in the Professional Development System in the Watson School of Education were selected to partner in this part of the endeavor, enabled by the grant. A student teacher, university supervisor, and cooperating teacher were trained in manipulating the hard copy assessment instrument from the state, the template developed for handheld computers, and using the handheld itself.The teachers were then able to conduct and record real-time assessment of student performance on math standards, both storing and merging information from the PDA to the desktop.

The good news: This new method of assessment was successful at the K-2 sites identified in both counties, and the technologies and their use in the assessment process a) resulted in significant reduction of time in recording and transferring data,b) allowed the recording and acquisition of student performance data to occur in the context of instruction, and c) informed teachers’ instructional decisions, ultimately improving teaching and learning in the classroom.