Technology Assessment

The world is changing everyday and as educators, we need to get with the program! Technology is everywhere and we need to start teaching our children the value of using it because they will need technological skills in the future. So, I think that it is important and beneficial to assess an educator’s technology leadership knowledge and skills as well as assessing the knowledge and skill of student technology skill levels. If we don’t assess both how will we know if teachers are doing their jobs? There are several pros and cons to assessing an educator’s technology skill level, but I will only discus a few.

One pro of assessing educators on their technology skills is that they will be aware of their strengths and weaknesses. When teachers receive this information they will be able to work on the areas that they need to improve. For example, the first week of class we had to complete a lot of assessments and as a result of the assessments I found out that my weakness was using web 2.0 tools and one of my strengths was incorporating technology in my lessons. So, I now know that I need to work on using web 2.0 tools in my classroom. Another pro of assessing educators’ technology skills is that the district will be able to provide better professional development. The district will be able to pin-point the weaknesses of most of the educators and provide them with professional development on those topics. For example, if most educators need help using web 2.0 tools in their classrooms it would be wise for the district to plan a professional development on that topic.

I also feel that there are some cons in assessing educators’ technology skills. One con would be if educators don’t take the technology assessments seriously. For example, if teachers wouldn’t tell the truth on the assessments. This would be a problem because then the teachers wouldn’t be able to improve in the area of their weakness. Another con would be if principals would start using these assessments as a means of termination. I don’t think principals should use these assessments to terminate teachers because it should be used for evaluation purposes only. This could also cause teachers to not tell the truth on the assessments.

As stated before, I do believe that it is important and beneficial to assess an educator’s technology leadership knowledge and skills as well as assessing the knowledge and skill of student technology skill levels. It seems like every career now has implemented technology, so why not integrate technology in the curriculum. We need to introduce technology to our students early so that they will be able to compete with other students.