Teaching, Learning, & Assessment in the Digital Era

This course is the ninth in a series of 11 courses in the in the sequence of courses. This course focuses on assessment of digital literacies in the classroom. This means that at some point educators need to sensitively assess the work of students as they read and write online texts. How do we validly and reliably do this? The class also focuses on assessment of literacies using digital tools. This means that we use tools like Google Forms and Spreadsheets…as well as other digital texts and tools to develop and administer formative and summative assessments.

Course Description

This course is designed to provide students with the theories and pedagogies necessary to understand, develop, and administer valid and reliable assessments of student literacy learning using the Internet and other communication technologies. Understanding your students’ content knowledge forms the basis for on-going instructional decisions and planning, and forms a critical link in the teaching cycle. Understanding of students’ content knowledge is gained through assessment as we observe, interact, and measure gains as students engage in a lesson. Content for the course will include a wide variety of materials that will provide educators with a working knowledge of the psychological and sociological forces that affect adolescent readers and writers. Experiences in this class will range from online/offline discussion, in-school fieldwork, to planning for classroom lessons.

Core Objectives

1. Demonstrate knowledge of assessment strategies, both formal and informal, and use the results to affect student achievement and engagement of ALL learners.
2. Demonstrate knowledge of lesson planning and appropriate instructional methods to support adolescents’ reading and writing skills across all content areas.
3. Students will use a variety of curricular materials in the planning and implementation of instructional practices, including online and offline sources, to support ALL learners.
4. Students will demonstrate knowledge of effective online and offline literacy processes, and develop strategies for instruction of them in their classroom.
5. Students will develop assessments using ICT tools, and use these results to inform instruction for students on one aspect of either new literacies or Internet integration into the classroom.

Essential Questions

• What are the knowledge, skills, and dispositions used by students as they read and write in classrooms using ICTs?
• What constructs are involved in these thinking processes and how do we assess them?
• What formative and summative assessments can be used/constructed to measure these constructs?
• How can this data be used to develop instruction that anticipates the needs of students?

The full version of the syllabus is embedded below. This version of the syllabus is an artifact and does not contain all of the edits and revisions to the syllabus we use each semester for the class.

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