Online Assessments

It's funny sometimes in Educational Technology how the rate and pace of change comes differently for different components of tech. For instance, in my district we were on the SMARTBoard bandwagon early, but slow on the ELMO integration.  Priorities, finances, and mandates come into play when choosing to integrate different technologies.  I'm happy that my district chose to update student / teaching tools as a priority for the past few years before we moved too far to get teacher tools for productivity in assessment. Data is not a bad word as some make it out to be. Data is helpful especially when it's timely and efficient to use. I'm not always happy with all of the programs that we use for looking at student information, but today I used the online component of Sunguard Performance Plus to gather info on my students through a quick quiz. It was easy to set up and I ran the test entirely paperlessly. I got the results and was able to move on to teach a lesson based on needs which appeared instantly in their assessments. It's not a bad program, and data is not the devil. I just need to convince some of my colleagues. 

By the way Subguard, I didn't need a 2 hour webinar to figure this out... 15 minutes was perfect. This may just revolutionize my classroom instruction yet again. I'm excited to move forward with this tool.