Assessment is any method used to appraise the knowledge, skills or understanding that a student possesses.  By providing constructive feedback to students on their work, assessment is fundamental to the teaching and learning process because it can show teachers (and their students) what areas of students’ performance needs to be improved.

Unfortunately, assessment of ICT, the predecessor to computing, has not been effective at achieving this end for most schools.  One of the main criticisms made by Ofsted about ICT in England for example, has been in the area of assessment.  In 2011 it was judged as no better than satisfactory in 61% of their sample.  In my view, there are three systemic challenges to the assessment of computing:

1. Until recently, the assessment framework itself has been based on ‘levels’, which have been fairly abstract and not always easy to interpret.
2. Many schools do not have an organised system of digital portfolios set up in which students’ work in ICT/computing can be consistently recorded and easily accessible.
3. Traditionally, schools have applied an assessment model based on the learners’ grasp of discrete bits of information rather than how they use that information in context to solve complex problems. This is particularly true of the former ICT curriculum, which focussed more on students acquiring a set of skills rather than on knowledge and understanding.

The shake up provided by the new computing curriculum offers an opportunity to put this right.  In the process of adapting to this new curriculum, I have been developing an integrated assessment, digital portfolio and digital badge model using Google Apps for Education to help address these systemic challenges.

1. The Assessment Framework

The expert panel, commissioned to review the national curriculum stated that all assessment should be linked directly to the content of the programmes of study.  This means that the computing programme of study should be broken down into a series of statements in which to inform the learning objectives of lessons.

The text below, which is derived directly from the 2014 national curriculum programme of study for computing, shows these statements.  Its organisation makes it easier to form judgements about students’ achievement of and progress towards the statutory attainment targets.  And it’s this assessment framework, which forms the basis of everything else that follows.

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This is a framework for assessing attainment in computing based on the work by senior computing lecturers, Miles Berry and Pete Kemp at the University of Roehampton.  Taking a pragmatic approach, they’ve grouped the statements into ‘bands’ from 1 to 8: this numbering could be used in place of the old levels, if schools are committed to using the old system of tracking progress.  I’ve also included in this framework relevant standards (in purple) provided by The International Society for Technology in Education.   

2. Digital Portfolios

The next step is to ensure that a system of digital portfolios is in place.  A portfolio is just a purposeful collection of student work, which can provide direct indicators of a student’s learning experiences.  Digital portfolios are particularly useful because they can serve as an administrative tool to manage and organise work created with different applications, which can then be shared on the web for the whole community to see.

As Woodward (2000) points out, the value of portfolios is thoroughly researched and their use in education is well documented.  By demonstrating the development of knowledge, skills and understanding over time, digital portfolios make valuable assessment and learning tools.  To ensure deep learning though, it’s not enough for students to simply showcase a series of digital artefacts they have created.  It’s also important that students reflect on the work they have produced, and this can be done by simply getting them to write about what they have learnt.  This helps to reinforce students’ knowledge and understanding, which complement the skills they demonstrate through the creation of digital artefacts.  In order to get students into the habit of developing decent digital portfolios, I’d recommend that the process is started early – the last couple of years of primary school is a good time to start.

Project work lends itself particularly well to this process of building up a digital portfolio.  A link to a game created in Scratch for example, with some commentary and reflection about the process of making the game, would provide evidence of a number of attainment targets.  Over the course of the key stage, a diverse portfolio of evidence of student learning should emerge, which meets all the curriculum requirements.  At any time, it also provides teachers with a snapshot of which attainment targets a student has met, and which still require more evidence. I therefore recommend that a list of links to students’ digital portfolios be placed on the same spreadsheet as that used for assessment of students’ attainment.

3. Assessment of knowledge, skills and understanding

In order to motivate students and at the same time provide assessment for learning opportunities, digital badges should be linked to the system of digital portfolios.  A digital badge (embedded into the digital portfolio) is just a mini-credential, providing students with a validated indicator of accomplishment in a particular area.

Students earn digital badges according to the areas of learning they demonstrate across the statutory attainment targets of the computing curriculum.  Below are the badge designs and descriptions, which I have adapted from the ones provided by makewav.es.  Different digital badges are awarded across the three themes of the computing curriculum: computer science, digital literacy and information technology.  Within each of the themes I have ordered the badges according to the level of achievement they represent.

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It’s important from the outset that this badge information is shared with students in a straightforward language that can be easily understood .  I would even say that the badge information itself should be embedded into the students’ digital portfolios, so that students can clearly identify what knowledge, skills and understanding they need to demonstrate in order to earn a particular badge.

Linking Assessment with Digital Portfolios & Badges

Assessment of students’ attainment feeds into the digital badge system quite easily, with badges for each of the attainment targets linked to relevant evidence on a student’s digital portfolio.  If a school already has Google Apps for Education, which is free, it makes sense to make full use of this google ecosystem to integrate the assessment of students’ attainment with digital badges and digital portfolios.  I have created this integrated assessment model in order to automatically issue digital badges to students upon having had their attainment graded by the teacher.  It means that students do not need another set of login information to access their digital badges and portfolios, and schools do not need to pay for premium services.

Below is an example of an assessment template that I would use to archive links to students’ digital portfolios, grade students’ work and issue students with digital badges. As the video explains underneath, this template is linked to a student badge assesment template, which is shared with students via Google Classroom for them to embed into their digital portfolios. When the assessment template is filled out, I use the Google Add-on, autoCrat, to merge the ‘Comments & Badge Display’ sheet of this assessment template with a “Badge code email template”. In this way, students automatically receive an email with the badge codes that they have been assigned. They then enter these badge codes onto their student badge templates, which automatically populate digital badge images onto their digital portfolios.

As well as addressing the systemic challenges of assessment, my intention with this has been to make the process of assessment easier for teachers to do and more effective in its outcomes for teaching and learning.  This assessment model is highly automated, freeing up time for teachers to focus on properly appraising students’ knowledge, skills and understanding across the curriculum.  For students, the digital portfolio and badge system allows them to reflect on and keep track of what they’ve learnt, informing targets for what comes next.  It gives parents a much more meaningful picture of what a child has learnt, and what they still need to study.  Finally, it allows school leadership and the inspectorate to more accurately track year on year progress of students.

Concluding thoughts…

First and foremost, assessment should be directly linked to the content of the curriculum. The statements that make up the assessment framework can then feed into digital badge information, which is best shared with students.  Students should then keep up a digital portfolio of evidence to showcase and reflect on their learning.  These digital portfolios need to be easily accessible by teachers, so that accurate assessments of students’ knowledge, skills and understanding is made possible.

References:

Woodward, H. (2000). Portfolios: Narratives for learning. Journal of In-Service Education Vol 26 No 2 p. 329 -347.

Education and technology have always been strongly related. This    is demonstrated by the many technologies, old and new, that are     used in classrooms everyday by teachers and students alike. In her   book, Teaching as a Design Science, Dana Laurillard makes the   interesting observation that education does not drive  technological  invention. Instead, education tends to be beholden to the inventiveness of other fields such as business and leisure. There are now a wide array of different “educational” technologies available (laptops, iPads, projectors, etc.), yet very few have their origins specifically within the classroom context.

Appropriate technology in an educational setting should therefore be assessed for its potential to meet educational aims.  The full potential of educational technology is only realised when it supports creativity and critical thinking.  In order to better understand how to evaluate the appropriateness of educational technology, it is important to identify what educational aims are, what educational technology is and how appropriate educational technology should be defined.

The current definition of educational technology from the Association for Education Communications & Technology (AECT) is as follows: Educational technology is the study and ethical practice of facilitating learning and improving performance by creating, using, and managing appropriate technological processes and resources.  The sheer breadth of what form technology can take and how it interacts with the learning environment has important implications for its potential to ‘facilitate learning and improve performance.’  For instance, both a pencil and a laptop can be seen as different types of technologies for use in the classroom.  However, this does not mean that either tool is necessarily appropriate for all classrooms or lessons all of the time.  What facilitates learning for one context or situation does not necessarily do so for all.

Traditionally, the concept of appropriate technology has been discussed with respect to economic development.  The British economist, Shumacher was the first to formerly posit the notion.  The criteria for appropriate technology is encapsulated in his book, Small Is Beautiful (1973), in which he states that it should be: (a) simple, (b) small scale, (c) low cost, and (d) non-violent.  Although the definition has subsequently been adapted by others, from the educational perspective, it suffices to stick with the original criteria.  The rationale underpinning the criteria is that ‘new possibilities are created for people, singly or collectively, to help themselves’ (1980, pp. 57).  This certainly ties into what most educators are trying to do, which is to develop independent learners.  Irrespective of context or situation, classroom or lesson, the core idea presented by Shumacher is that when it comes to the aim of empowering people by use of appropriate technology, less is more.  From a pedagogical standpoint, appropriate technology would imply itself to be easily and non-invasively assimilated into the learning environment of the classroom.

The appropriateness of technology according to Shumacher’s criteria is positively related to the degree of what Mishra & Koelher (2006) have referred to as “transparency”, i.e. the extent to which the technology blends into the environment such that it is not even considered a technology anymore. These technologies, which have become so commonplace such as pens and exercise books, are now rendered as “transparent”.  Arguably, this is in contrast to digital technologies for example, which are not as deeply assimilated into the educational system and therefore not as “transparent”.  Diana Laurillard (2012, pp. 210) supports such an assertion: ‘the story of digital learning technologies has hardly begun, and there will be no end until they have become so fully embedded in education that we will not even ask the question….(Paper) is now so completely embedded, and it is so diverse in its benefits, that no-one begins to ask how “effective” it is.’  A “transparent” technology then can certainly be seen to meet Shumacher’s criteria.  Pedagogically speaking, the greater the transparency (and therefore appropriateness) of educational technology, the greater its effectiveness insofar as facilitating teaching and learning.

Transparency alone, although for the most part a necessary condition, is not a sufficient condition in determining the appropriateness of technology in the classroom setting.  Luckin (2006) discusses teaching and learning as taking place within an ‘ecology’ – a dynamic and constantly-evolving interaction between a wide range of resources.  She refers to this dynamic as ‘The Learner Centric Ecology of Resources Model’ and argues that such a model helps us to design educational experiences that are relevant to the learner’s needs.  Ultimately, this model sets the context in which technologies are used and in part, determines the appropriateness of their use.  Most importantly, it shows us that a technology appropriate for one classroom is not necessarily appropriate for another.  This is because the model is made up of resources, which include knowledge on the part of the teacher and learner.  In the case of interactive whiteboards for example, some teachers are very knowledgeable in how to effectively use this technology, whereas others are not.  To this extent, it can be seen that the appropriateness of technology is defined by the user.  Mishra and Koelher (2006) refer to a very specific type of knowledge that the teacher needs: Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK), arguing that this complex type of knowledge is required for thoughtful pedagogical uses of technology.  As the technology is used more regularly and becomes embedded in the classroom, its “transparency” not only increases to better facilitate the pedagogy, but the technology itself is also used more effectively by the class teacher as the teacher’s TPCK improves.

The relatively recent arrival of digital technologies is still filtering its way down into the educational system.  Education will have to adapt in order to be able to fully embrace digital technology.  Indeed, most schools are now only just starting to fully integrate digital applications into their ICT curriculums, much less the curriculum as a whole and are therefore not adequately preparing students for ICTs in real world contexts.  Prior to the overhaul in the English ICT curriculum (now called ‘Computing’), the former UK Education Secretary, Michael Gove had branded the ICT curriculum in England’s schools as a ‘mess’.  Until recently, a lot of ICT education had been inappropriate for today’s needs.  Much more emphasis in particular is now needed on teaching students to use open source software from an earlier age, as the core principles of open source are being recognised by the wider community.

What sets open source software apart from other technologies is that it is much more people centred than closed source software.  As Pearce (2012) points out, ‘Where Microsoft might utilise a few thousand programmers and software engineers to debug their code, the Linux community has access to hundreds of thousands of programmers debugging, rewriting, and submitting code.’  It is this type of mass-scale collaboration that is driving the success of other Web 2.0 applications such as social networking sites and wikis.  In education, moves have been made in this direction with the high-profile case of Nicholas Negroponte’s “One Laptop Per Child” project, which fully embraces open source software.  By bringing about greater connectivity by means of collaboration such projects serve as a vehicle to empower teachers and students, particularly in the developing world where lack of access to key information can be a critical issue.  This can also help to bridge the so-called digital divide in which there is a gap between different groups of people in terms of their effective access to digital and information technology.

Pearce uses Appropedia as an example of an ‘Open source appropriate technology’ website, where a large number of participants are allowed to create and modify the content directly from their web browsers.  Education has slowly followed suit with similar open source resources such as ‘Curriki‘ and ‘Connexions‘, which facilitate collaboration and access to free instructional materials for educators.  The appropriateness of such sites are measured insofar as they ‘simplify the administration of collaboratively organising information, project examples, best practices, and ‘‘how tos’’’ (Pearce et al. 2010).  In so doing, open source software can be the solution to the problem of access to critical information for sustainable development.

Clearly, any medium that enhances peer communication is a step in the right direction towards achieving greater levels of appropriateness.  In my own practice for example, I have organised the setting up of a blog for every student from Year 3 to Year 6.  The purpose of these blogs has been to digitalise paper-based book reviews that the children have had to do in the past.  It represents a cheaper and simpler alternative to photocopying and distributing copious paper book review templates.  By encouraging greater collaboration and increasing the accountability of both the student and class teacher, these blogs help to improve the quality of students’ written work, as they are effectively publishing it for the whole school community to see.  In the process, the children learn important digital literacies, such as netiquette and how best to search for information online.  It also serves for a smoother transition into secondary school, where secondary students are having to setup and manage their own wiki spaces.  In these ways, the use of blogs represent an appropriate use of digital technology for educational purposes.

Appropriate technology can take the form of many different tools.  As technology becomes more “transparent” to the extent that it is embedded in the classroom, it more closely aligns itself with Shumacher’s criterion.  In addition, the extent to which a technology empowers students to become more independent learners and teachers to deliver more engaging lessons should be seen to be at the heart of determining the appropriateness of educational technologies because this is what education is all about.  However, the extent that educational technologies achieves these aims is largely contingent upon TPCK, as teachers need specific pedagogical and content knowledge to use technology thoughtfully.  Moreover, the emergence of web 2.0 applications and specifically open source software models, identify the need for appropriate technology to be people-centred.  This is because the more people developing the software, the more the software is going to benefit from being of better quality and greater reliability.  Independent of the technology though, as educators we need to make sure that it is of greatest benefit to teaching and learning.  This can only be achieved by embedding the technology into our daily pedagogy such that it is not out of place and can be used very naturally by teachers and learners alike.

References:

Januszewski and M. Molenda (Eds.). 2008. Association for Educational Communications and Technology.  Educational Technology: A definition with commentary. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Kershaw. 11th January 2012. “Michael Gove brands ICT curriculum ‘a mess'”.  The Independent.

Laurillard, D.  Teaching as a Design Science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology.  2012.  Routledge.

Luckin. 2006. The learner centric ecology of resources: A framework for using technology to scaffold learning

Mishra and J. Koelher. 2006. Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge.

M. Pearce. 2012. The case for open source appropriate technology.

F. Shumacher. 1973. Small is Beautiful.