Assessmenta and the ways technology makes it authentic and smart

Assessments have been a mainstream method of determining a students comprehension, understanding of a specific subject matter, as well as areas of improvement. This is all well in good, however in today's world students need to be stimulated beyond the pencil and piece of paper. Essays with a simple question are good, but allowing students to reflect on a picture of a mainstream video and then allowing them to write based on what they have just seen, reflecting on the teachers lectures will only further allow for the development of inference and genuine understand, aside from memorizing definitions and notes from a classroom. Allowing students to apply real life scenarios as in the essay question I posed in my quiz, children ice skating and children swimming (two cartoon pcitures) will allow for a student to infere the differences in the property of water and how each are different based on the atmospheric temperature.

There are so many advantages to technology for each student population that a teacher needs to address within his/her classroom. For example, a student with a severe physical disability can use with his/her mind answer the questions (with training of course) questions on their own... (as seen in a recent episode of "House") This type of technology though very expensive gives students the freedom to be involved and to feel like they can do it...alone.

My one and only draw back is when partial credit could be awarded to a student, since technology is only programmable, unless you had a siftware that could highlight a variety of words that you hope is within a written essay, this area of the assessment might require a teacher to be subjective with the information, since synonyms and use of grammar, sentence structure, and thought structure is completely interpretative.