Assessing Technology

Assessing tech skills:
When completing an integrated tech project both sets of skills should be assessed. As most of the printed materials on this subject suggest, assessing the tech skills should be as important as the other curricular area. If the project has a rubric, parts of the rubric should focus strictly on the tech skills, the subject matter, and then how the two are related.

When starting any project in classrooms most people try to assess the students' prior knowledge, so that they can gauge where to start and how much basic skill to teach. In my opinion tech skills should not be any different. In some cases teachers want to integrate but will not take time to teach the tech skills in isolation before hand. It is very difficult to teach a student how to use PowerPoint while doing the project (if the student has never used the program before). Sometimes we can assume that students will know how to right click and double click, only to find out mid-lesson that you have to teach those skills as well. These events can lead to frustration for both teacher and student.
To me its the same as teaching word problems in math. If you cannot read the problem, regardless of how well you are in math, you will not be able to compete the assignment.
I think that to show that technology has its place in the curriculum we have to teach and assess the tech skills and then have the students use these skills to enhance or showcase what they have learned in other areas. Then as a last step, showcase how the two work together and make each other better!
http://ldt.stanford.edu/~tacyt/projectrubric.html
http://2pointohteaching.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-are-teachers-assessing-with.html