Week #5 - Online Assessment & Laptops for Everyone

There are so many great tools available to teachers these days. Online assessment sites like Quia and Quizstar have many advantages. They free up a lot of time for the teacher, not only time grading tests, but time preparing tests as well. An instructor can flag a question to be used later and the computer will just "pull" the question over to the new test. These sites can also arrange the test questions as well as the answer choices randomly which should really eliminate the possibility of students cheating. Because these sites give such detailed feedback, it is a great idea to create a pre-test to determine what prior knowledge your students have, allowing the instructor to really focus in on new material rather than re-hashing material the students already know. The instructor can then compare the pre-test to the test after the unit to evaluate the effectiveness of his instruction. Another benefit is the ability to grade tests/essays blindly (without knowing which student wrote it). It really helps to keep any sort of prejudice out of the grading process.


This week, we also examined the $100 Laptop Project (One Laptop Per Child), a project that almost sounds too good to be true. My feelings are kind of "on the fence" about this project. The mission of the project points out that "children are consigned to poverty and isolation - just like their parents." I believe that this is certainly true in a lot of cases and I can see where giving children in poverty and isolation access to the technology that many developed countries have will help to solve that problem. However, I do agree that there are some serious problems that aren't being addressed, but could be with the money that is going to this project. Some of these countries have high rates of mortality and hunger, and don't have clean water. What good is giving a laptop to a child going to do if that child doesn't live past the age of twelve? However, maybe these students could be the ones to solve these problems if they had the same technology and access to others' ideas from which they are currently cut off. On the other side of the argument though is the fact that we (the USA) are supposed to be the success story for education. The project's site pointed out that some of the countries can only afford $20 per year per student while the US spends $7500 per year per student, and yet we still don't seem to be able to educate all of our own students. We have a lot of students in our own country that could benefit from this same technology, yet Negroponte said that they would be available to us, however ... if we buy one for our child we also have to buy one for a child in a poor country. I think that's a great idea for those who can afford it, but what about the family's here who can't afford one? Regardless, I think this project is a great idea and applaud Mr. Negroponte for trying to make a difference in the world.