Technology can serve multiple purposes, among them being increased teacher efficiency, enhanced student experience, and even increased environmental responsibility. But you don’t have to be “all-in” with technology to do this. Some things require paper. Most things don’t, even though we may have “always done it that way”. If you can automate part of what you do with one part of an assessment, you should. And just because one part of an assessment requires paper doesn’t mean the whole thing needs to be on paper.

A Math “Hybrid” Assessment

Case in point: I just finished creating the 8th Grade Unit 2 Mid-Unit Assessment on iLearn (Moodle). Here’s a short video overview of the assessment: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XwJlg3paOq2tNZTSINftopgYampPMygh/view (only viewable within the Dearborn Schools domain).

Since the test requires students to actually graph items, we created this test as a sort of “hybrid” assessment, complete with a one-page document that includes the graphs and data tables students need to complete the assessment on paper that the teacher simply needs to print out and make a copy for each student.

There are several advantages to doing things this way:

• You save copies and paper. There’s really only one sheet of paper that needs to be printed out.
• Questions that can be graded automatically ARE graded automatically.
• Questions with longer responses can be graded much more efficiently, as you can grade multiple student responses on each screen by clicking the Gear button>Manual grading.
• Once the test is created, it can be shared with everyone else who teaches 8th grade AND it’s ready for next year and every year beyond this one that we use the curriculum resources we just adopted.
• Need a retake? One option is to just allow another attempt.

If you’re a Dearborn Teacher and would like a copy of the test in your own course, you would like me to help you do more of these, or if you have any feedback, questions, or concerns and hesitations about doing things this way, I’d love to hear from you! Please leave a comment below or email me at harrisr@dearbornschools.org .