Section 1 of 21 Things Assessment , Evaluation and Survey Tools

The first of the 21 Things involves Assessment, Evaluation and Surveys. Assessment and evaluation involves the use of rubrics and surveys establishes a quick and concise way of publishing and collecting data for a survey.

The rubrics are very helpful organizational tools as well as assessment and evaluation tools. Consider any lesson that you might be planning. If you go through setting up your learning goals in rubric form, you can leave columns for how you will teach the idea, what you expect the student to learn from it, how you will assess that learning as well as the evaluation of the assessment. Setting the plan up in this format allows the teacher to see the most important concepts and how they will be presented. Evaluation of learning becomes a well defined process that makes it more valid. It is much easier to recognize whether or not the standards of the educational administration have been met or not, because they can and should be included within the rubric. Though some might argue that they should have a different tool for the planning of the class, if it is all kept as a single unit, from inception to planning to presentation to assessment to evaluation, it creates what would in other disciplines be referred to as a paper trail and increases the validity of the entire process.

My survey was created using Survey Monkey and links directly to it from the blog. The GUI for creating the survey is very user friendly as is the page for retrieving the data. Whether it was my personal reading skills or the presentation format, I can not say, but connecting the link to the blog was time consuming. My feeling is that I was trying to make it harder than it actually is, and once I determined how it worked, there were no further problems. In defense of Survey Monkey, I do preach regularly that if you run into issues with a program you should use the embedded help within the program; in this case I did not use it.

Just as a matter of my own curiosity, if you have the time please click on the previous posting and take the survey. I hope to use this or a similar one to set up classes to assist those who are having problems with some of the listed programs. Since I work in the computer lab on campus, these classes could include students, faculty and staff.

Working frantically on section 2 which includes a lovely bunch of keyboard shortcuts that I am making into an old fashioned cheat sheet like we used on our keyboards before GUIs.

Ann