I took this photograph of the end-of-term pile of assessments to be done by a teacher some years ago. But since then not much has changed. The work is still printed out, marked and put into a folder, marks written up in a marks book and then the whole file for each student is assessed. And many teachers will now be doing this well into the Summer term!The document produced for Becta by John Winkley offers some hope of a solution for overworked teachers, but probably not universally available in my lifetime! As I have argued eleswhere, the place for such powerful tools should be within the VLE, but some schools are still lagging behind in installing such tools or even really getting pupils and parents to access their VLEs from home!
As the blurb states:
An authoritative survey of a technology which, perhaps like virtual reality, has not come of age as quickly as expected. A wide-ranging overview describes current and future applications of on-screen examinations, audio, text editing, adaptive assessment, games and simulations, short text answer marking, essay marking, spoken language marking, mathematics marking and voting devices. John Winkley argues that e-assessment has potential to be transformational in developing the benefits of immediate results and improved feedback, interactivity and richness of ICT for more authentic assessment, e-assessment as an enabler of better assessment and as a democratising influence on the assessment process which also encompasses diversity.BUT, he mentions e-Portfolios only once in passing! It is surely time to start encouraging students to take the initiative in claiming what should be assessed along with their own reflections and possibly those of peers and mentors. Winkley is arguing for some future nirvana, I am arguing that e-Portfolios (and in particular eFolio) should be adopted NOW!
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