How can I utilize technology to assess students’ progress and help them assess their own progress as readers and writers?

Throughout this module I have tried to answer the question, “how can I utilize technology to assess students’ progress and help them assess their own progress as readers and writers?” I mainly focused on finding tools that could help my students and me assess their writing progress, and found several that addressed my question in the article “New Wave in Writing.” After sharing this article with my classmates, I learned that several of my peers are also interested in finding tools to help students monitor their progress as writers. Of the resources listed in the article, the ones that offered immediate feedback to students and progress reports to teachers are Write to Learn by Pearson, Revision Assistant by Turnitin, and PEG Writing:

·       Write to Learn scores students’ writing using a variety of rubrics, including a college and career readiness, ELL, and six traits of high quality writing (ideas, organization, conventions, sentence fluency, word choice, and voice).

·       Revision Assistant offers specific feedback on students’ analysis, focus, language, and evidence in their writing.

·       PEG Writing provides students with feedback and scores for textual evidence, content accuracy, and the six traits of high quality writing.

On the surface, all of these tools appear to offer very similar services, and I need to do more research to determine which one is best.

One of my peers shared an online resource that I can use to help students engage in and improve their writing—Storybird. This free tool motivates students to create digital stories—picture books, chapter books, and poetry—using artwork as inspiration and allows classmates to give feedback on one another’s stories. This could be an engaging alternative to the standard academic paper format for summative assessments, which according to Professor Davidson Of Duke University, “is a real disincentive to creative but untrained writers.”

When I looked for a tool for assessing students’ reading progress, I went back to one of the resources that I discovered during the first module—Biblionasium, which is similar to Goodreads, but is specifically designed for kids. While further exploring this site, I discovered a feature that provides teachers with reports of students’ reading for a given time period. On this report page, teachers and students can see: the books students report they have finished, how much time and the number of pages they report they have read, the reading level of each book they have read, and the Lexile range of each book they have read. If students are entering this information consistently and accurately, this information could be very useful in monitoring how much students are reading and the level of books they are reading.

References:

Biblionasium. Retrieved from www.biblionasium.com

Fink, J. (2016). New WAVE in writing. District Administration, 52(8), 49-51.

PEG Writing. Retrieved from www.pegwriting.com

Revision Assistant. Retrieved from ww.turnitin.com/en_us/what-we-offer/revision-assistant

Richtel, M. (2012, January 20). Blogs vs. term papers. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/education/edlife/muscling-in-on-the-term-paper-tradition.html

Write to Learn. Retrieved from www.writetolearn.net