Thursday, November 7, 2013

Online Assessments for Understanding Digital Citizenship


Common Sense Media is an absolute awesome web resource for obtaining curriculum addressing digital citizenship topics to your students. 


 There are 8 topic areas of content written in all four grade level stages; K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12.  There are videos, questions, activities, and many resources to assist any teacher with integrating digital citizenship content into their classroom.  All activities are aligned to common core standards.


If you look into their scope and sequence of how these lessons are recommended being taught, lessons are broken into groups of approximately 5 lessons per unit.  At the end of each unit is a Unit Assessment.

I decided to take a couple of Unit Assessments to experience what the students will encounter.  There are a variety of question types similar to what you'll be seeing in a Smarter Balance test, that is to say there are very few multiple choice type questions.  Most questions involve higher level thinking like arranging an order of events, or placing items onto different parts of a venn diagram.




Students begin an assessment by typing in their name and an optional email address for their teacher, which will auto send the results to the teacher at the conclusion.  If a student incorrectly answers a question, the program will ask the student to try again, upon which if they miss a second time the correct answer will be revealed.  Only the students first answers are calculated and printed in the assessment results at the end. 

Allow for at least 30 minutes for students to complete the activity, as there are 15-20 questions they need to answer.  Students will be able to print the results of their assessment which shows the question, how the student answered, and the correct answer.