Contact:

Sara Dexter – sdexter@umn.edu

What purpose does your assessment tool serve? 

The eTIP Cases are multimedia, online instructional resources that provide learning opportunities with embedded assessment for teachers to practice their instructional decision-making skills, particularly related to technology integration and implementation. These cases provide learners with virtual yet realistic context-rich experiences to grapple with as they apply an Educational Technology Integration and Implementation Principle, or eTIP. While learners seek out the different school context information in each case to answer the key question that was posed in the case’s opening scenario, the embedded, web-based assessment tools track their work. Students’ step-by-step decisions are displayed in the form of search-path maps powered by IMMEX^TM, and as relevancy scores. Students’ essay responses to the question are submitted and scored online as well

Please indicate which category best describes your tool:

a.        _____ Tools that allow users to ask questions of data (tools for collecting and disaggregating data, including surveys, self-reported data and standardized data)

b.       ____ Tools for observation (including teacher observation and observation of student behavior or performance)

c.        _X__ Tools for reviewing student products (including electronic or digital portfolios)

This category best fits, although it isn’t very exact. The student product assessed here is the learner’s instructional decision making about technology integration. The case is an exercise to elicit that and the case software captures as a student product both the decision the learner submits and the “thinking trail” through the case and en route to this decision.

Who is the audience for this assessment tool?

There are two audiences: a) University instructors and the preservice or in-service teachers who are their students and b) Staff developers at schools and the in-service teachers who are their students.

What technology is used?

Approximately how many people are currently using this system?

What professional development (for students or assessors) is required to use the tool?

Teacher educators should review our online implementation support materials.

These help teacher educators understand a) the issues the eTIPs cover, the implications they hold for preservice teachers, and their relationships to the technology standards;

 b) how the design of the problem space and set design facilitates analysis and decision-making practice by preservice teachers about technology integration and implementation issues;

c) the suite of assessment tools that are available to use with the eTIP Cases; and

d) support teacher educators developing instructional plans for teachers to use and learn from the eTIP Cases. Learners can use the cases if they have the prerequisite skills of navigating with a web browser and utilizing and word processor and cut and paste commands.

To use the tool effectively, what else should the school have in place?

To use eTIP Cases effectively, the site should have in place some familiarity with using simulations or cases as a teaching and learning method. This will help instructors/facilitators and learners to recognize

how the case, or simulated school experience, provides an opportunity to reason and think about technology integration or implementation as well as a platform for providing a group with a common experience in thinking about technology, so as to facilitate group discussion in a class or staff.

If you haven't already addressed it, how does your tool help students or teachers demonstrate that they are meeting standards?

The eTIP Cases help preservice or in-service teachers demonstrate that they are meeting standards through the assessment tools inherent in the cases. There are scored essays, and visual representations of the "search paths" students used to reason their way to the scored essays.

What questions would you like participants to address?