Working Smarter Not Harder: With New Assessment Technology Providing Instant Feedback on Their Students, Once-Skeptical Teachers Now Have No Desire to Return to the Way Things Were

WHEN BLANCHE KAPUSHION first introduced mobile assessment tools to teachers at Kyffin Elementary School in Jefferson County, Colorado, she didn't think the tools would last long. teachers just weren't comfortable with the technology, says Kapushion, principal at Kyffin. took too much time for them to get up to speed, and they got frustrated. weren't used to using technology in class, and it didn't look like that was going to change. But it did. Teachers at Kyffin now use Mobile Classroom Assessment (mCLASS) Reading and Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) software, both from Wireless Generation (www.wirelessgeneration.com), to conduct mobile assessments and progress checks in all of their K-3 classrooms. regularly use the mCLASS Reading program to check reading comprehension and fluency, and to target or track areas where students are lagging. According to Kapushion, the breakthrough came when teachers realized the technology helped them work smarter, not harder. teachers now feel that the mobile assessment tools make their jobs more manageable, she says. They feel valued as educators because we have given them tools that allow them to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently. Now that the technology has had some time to mature, many teachers, administrators, and students believe mobile assessment devices are here to stay. Indeed, the market has seen a continuous expansion, with more and more players tapping into it over the past few years. Companies continue to work closely with educators and even students to understand and respond to their needs, and teachers who once pooh-poohed the tools now say they are unwilling to give them up. Instant Fixes Getting instant feedback has been invaluable, says Iris Higashi-Oshiro, a fifth-grade teacher at Konawaena Elementary School in Kealakekua, Hawaii, where teachers and students have been using the Indigo Learning System from LearningSoft (www.learningsoft.net) for the past six months. There is no better way to respond and adapt to your students than to have that kind of immediate data at your fingertips. Teachers at Konawaena Elementary choose from a bank of standards-based questions and other assessment content aligned with national and state standards for math, language arts, science, and social sciences, then wirelessly send the questions to each student's Indigo unit. Students enter their answers, and their results appear immediately. Those results are used to observe improvement over time, or to project how students may score on state kids are excited to use something new and technology-based, says Higashi-Oshiro. surprising thing is that they also really enjoy the immediate feedback and finding out how they did right after they've finished their tests. Ann Bedford agrees. number-one positive thing about mobile assessment tools is the immediate access to data, says Bedford, director of curriculum products and intervention for Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) in Maryland. Technology has given our administrators immediate data on all our primary students--what level they are reading at, whether their progress monitoring is working, whether we are fixing an issue or we need to try something else. Using these tools, we can now make adjustments faster to ensure kids don't fall behind. MCPS is using mCLASS:Reading 3D software, a product developed through collaboration between the school district and Wireless Generation. It enables teachers to administer two kinds of assessments--DIBELS and a set of measures from the MCPS Assessment Program in Primary Reading that is based on balanced literacy, an approach to reading instruction which blends phonics lessons with more holistic activities that emphasize understanding meaning through context. The technology lets teachers capture data from both assessments in one place, for a full picture of a student's reading development. …