Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Technology Skills Assessment

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I’m looking for a tool to measure the technology skills of our teachers and students, one that would cover basic hardware operation stuff as well as ability to manage files, do basic functions in Office type software, and use the Internet. Preferably it would be something we could offer online.

Anyone using or know of a tool like this that they would recommend?

Comments

  1. Rick says

    I’ll be interested to see what comments you get to this post. I was involved in developing a technology assessment for elementary preservice teachers here at BYU last year. The problem with most of the technology assessments out there is they expect a person to have memorized a “correct” way to do something, but true masters of technology know there are several ways to get at an outcome. For example, I bombed an Excel test once because I used shortcut keys instead of the drop-down menus. So we realized we needed a way to assess a person’s ability to create artifacts, not memorize keystrokes. But now you’re talking about a performance assessment, and those are very costly and subjective because they require a rater to evaluate the performance.

    We haven’t found an adequate solution yet, but these are some of the issues we found in the different types of technology assessments.

  2. Tim Lauer says

    Hey Will, Have you looked at Profiler?
    http://profilerpro.com/

    “ProfilerPro allows for the evaluation of knowledge, attitude, and skill based on simple surveys implemented via the World Wide Web. Inspired by the widely popular collaboration tool – Profiler, ProfilerPro maintains the ability for members of a group to share knowledge and promote collaboration based on responses to skills-based survey items.”

  4. Kevin Jarrett says

    Will,

    Have you not seen the ISTE/MSFT assessment tool announced at NECC? Designed expressly for NCLB 8th grade skills assessment – perhaps it could be a baseline for your incoming freshmen?

    http://www.iste.org/resources/asmt/msiste/index.cfm

    Had a few kinks when I checked originally, but it’s working now, just remember to use Internet Explorer – it doesn’t like Mozilla very much.

    -kj-