Journal 3: Assessment Made Easy

Citation: Zucker, A (2009).Assessment Made Easy. Learning and Leading with Technology, (June/July2009). 18-21.

This article is about a charter high school in Denver that has a one-to-one laptop ratio with its students. The school graduated it's first class in 2008 and saw a tremendous success rate with all of it's seniors being admitted to a four year college. I found this article very interesting because it sounds like there is a very supportive administrative staff at the school, which makes this program possible. It was also interesting to read about the teacher's being able to select which programs and software they use in the class, with only a few things being mandatory. That really gives the teacher freedom to create lesson plans that he/she feel will benefit the students the most.

Did the teachers have to go through any extra, specialized training to be hired at DSST? I think it would be hard to teach in this school if you don't have a solid technological foundation, which makes me wonder how much on-site training the school did/does of it's teachers. I imagine that to do such training would cost a significant amount of money so I am curious as to whether or not this type of program would be as successful, or even possible, in a lower-income area. If they didn't do any on-site training, was the teachers level of technical competency a factor in being hired?

Do the students get to take the laptops home to facilitate homework assignments? The article talked at length about the use of the laptops in the classroom, but how much students get to use computers at home could make a big difference in the success rate. I would think that the ability to take the laptops home would greatly drive the success rate of the program, versus if the students only had access to them during school hours.