18 Jun Which digital tool is the best for your student?
“You can read this article in 1 minute”
If I start my article with this sentence, probably I would have many many reads. But unfortunately, I cannot guarantee that to you. So, half of the readers I have already lost. How do I know this? Because nowadays people measure the value of information on how much time they have to spend on it but do you really think that gives us the real value? This is another story and a subjective topic.
So, which assessment tool is the best for your student? This is an even more subjective topic depending on many conditions. The formative assessment methodology is focused on the student learning style, finding their weaknesses, and improving their knowledge as well as the learning process. Therefore, different curriculum, different learning styles, and motivation directly affect student knowledge. This is a very simple definition so I apologize to all researchers in this area, but you know I only have a minute.
We already know how teachers race with time as we do. So in our contribution to ATS STEM (https://www.atsstem.eu/), we assess the functional requirements of digital tools and propose a checklist for teachers to see which digital tools match formative assessment requirements and compare benefits. We think the experience of the teacher is our main source of information to help their colleagues. With this technical specification, they can easily remove the redundant tools and find dissatisfied requirements.
As seen in the checklist above, the first and second column is for functional requirement id and description. Then, we give some example tools which ensure functional requirement. How can the teacher use the checklist? The teacher fills in the names of the tools which will be used. If the tool satisfies a functional requirement a checkmark should be placed on their intersection. Then, the teacher makes sure that every functional requirement has at least one checkmark and that none of the tools are redundant.
The example digital tool list is not comprehensive and only to provide teachers with some guidance. Some advanced tools, such as Moodle, cover all functional requirements. Yet, the checklist demonstrates the tools with the strongest focus on each functional requirement.
Outlook
With this contribution, we aim to help teachers to take easy decisions and save precious time. We also believe that teachers’ experience with this checklist can have a strong impact on technology providers to design our future digital tools.