BLATS



Like most educational organizations, Lincoln Public Schools has long recognized a need to gauge the digital literacy of teachers. BL@TS is an instrument being development right now (11/08) that we hope will provide that information to LPS in an appropriate manner.


 * Here's how it will work:**

Teachers log in to the tool and are presented with a series of statements regarding the use of technology in an educational setting. They simply respond by clicking YES or NO to define whether or not each statement is true in their case. The number of questions they are asked will depend upon their responses. There are six statements for each defined technology "thread." Each time a teacher answers YES in response to a statement, they are shown the next statement in that thread. As soon as they answer NO, they jump to the next thread. The technology threads are as follows, teachers have the potential to respond to as few as 12 statements, or as many as 72.

• PRESENTATIONS • PROJECTION • AUDIO • VIDEO • EMAIL • WEB PRESENCE • DOCUMENTATION • FILE STORAGE • DATA MANAGEMENT • PEOPLE RESOURCES • HARDWARE RESOURCES • SOFTWARE RESOURCES

Teachers may return and "retake" the BL@TS assessment whenever they choose to.

The primary purpose of BLATS is to provide suggestions that will help teachers continue to improve their technology skills. For each of the 72 statements, there is a corresponding suggestion, should a teacher happen to say NO to that statement. After completing the self-assessment, teachers will be provided with a report that offers a suggestion per thread that should help them push forward with their understanding.


 * **[|View all statements and the corresponding NO suggestions]**

The statements were written by a team of LPS teachers from various buildings and disciplines, district curriculum and assessment specialists, and were informed by national technology standards for teachers as well as Bloom's updated taxonomy of knowledge dimensions. The corresponding suggestions were written to be friendly and approachable, offer a big picture and then some specific examples of paths to improvement.

60 days after completing the assessment, teachers will receive an automatically generated email asking them to rate the quality of the suggestions they received and offer any feedback. This tool was developed to evolve. While all statements were written with a long-range scope, we will have the ability to update statements and responses over time to better keep pace with current technology realities.

Building Principals will be able to request a building snapshot that shows where the strengths and weaknesses are in their building, district personnel are able to request the same for the district as a whole. It is our hope that the response data may also be used in aggregate to inform building and district level staff development.

This instrument is purely self reporting. It is a low-stakes assessment with no ties to employee evaluation, unless the individual teacher chooses to bring their results to the table at the time of assessment.

LPS is happy to share the BL@TS tool with anyone who may be able to use it in their environment. The program itself was developed in the ColdFusion programming language, and ties into local Active Directory data in LPS. so it will probably not be very useful as a stand-alone tool in other environments. However, we are happy to share the thinking and all text statements and responses the tool provides if they are of value to you.