October 2005 — Features

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Tech + Imagination = Results

In another instance, methods instructors, methods students, and a UNCW graduate who was working as a first-year teacher at a local alternative secondary school joined together to develop an online, interactive, cross-disciplinary unit on CD-ROM.As a way to support the struggling first-year teacher—and understanding that students tend to gravitate toward real-life applications of both study and technology—the collaborative team designed the unit about careers and getting a job. The unit began by having students take an inventory that identified their likes and skills, then sent students to a career menu where they could choose an occupation. Students were taken through scenarios where they rented an apartment,bought a car, and went clothes shopping for professional wardrobes. To address the Standard Course of Study for social studies and science, each student now had money from his “job” to take a “vacation” to countries taught in the seventh-grade social studies curriculum in order to study science-related content. Each segment contained an assessment component tied to the Standard Course of Study. This project has since been adopted as an ongoing expectation for all students in this Watson School of Education middle grades methods course.

Using and Creating Online Assessment Tools The following is another example of how technology teaming with assessment has radically changed the teaching in middle grades methods courses everywhere. Professors in southeastern North Carolina are using online assessment tools to evaluate their students’ performances and to teach prospective teachers how to use the assessment tools with their own middle grades students. These tools include a student response system, a Web-based assessment program developed by the university’s Computer Science Department; Examview, a commercial product from FSCreations Inc. (www.fscreations.com), for construction of tests; and TaskStream (

www.taskstream.com), a partner in the grant, for creating young adult novel units and generating electronic portfolios aligned with Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) standards. They also include online teaching resources such as those from The New York Times; 4teachers.org, so teacher candidates can generate tests in their own classes; and Zoomerang.com, which allows them to develop online surveys for assessment. One online assessment resource that’s been particularly effective has allowed teachers and teacher-education students to move with the times and accommodate the new learning styles of the current generation. A technology instructor from UNCW’s Specialty Studies Department is using a game Web site (people.uncw.edu/sherrilld/Edn356/game.htm) where the university students create assessments in a game format (such as Space Invaders, Tic-Tac-T'e, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Battleship, etc.