Information Technology Grade Expectations
& Performance Tasks

The Information Technology Grade Expectations clearly identify what IT skills and concepts students must master in order to be "technologically literate," one of the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act.  The South Burlington School District has identified a subset of these that we feel are the most important--the SBSD Information Technology Power GEs.

The Information Technology Grade Expectations specify what teachers must assess at some point in a two-grade time span.  In order to clarify who is responsible for teaching and assessing what, Vermont Information Technology educators developed a set of Instructional Guides.  These guides specify three levels of teacher instruction and assessment responsibilities:

Introduction--Teachers introduce skills and concepts for the first time

Practice--Teachers help students practice and work toward mastery of skills and concepts

Assessment--Teachers extend student practice toward mastery and ultimately assess the students

There are Instructional Guides for teachers of grades K through 10.  Each of the guides for Grades 2 - 10 includes two or more Performance Tasks and related assessment rubrics.  Performance Tasks are activities in which students demonstrate their level of mastery of specific skills and concepts by performing or producing something--i.e., they are the vehicle for assessing the Information Technology Grade Expectations.  The Performance Tasks are written fairly generically so that they can be incorporated into a wide variety of curricular topics.

A team of Vermont teachers (including our very own Donna Sullivan-Macdonald and Dayle Wright) developed a set of Example Performance Tasks.  These tasks have been tailored to specific content areas and are designed to serve as examples of performance tasks teachers might develop or use for their curricula.  Hopefully, many of these tasks will require only minor modifications to use in your classroom.

Orchard teachers have also developed several technology-rich tasks.  Please see http://orchard.sbschools.net/library/tasks/index.htm.

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Problems or Concerns?  Email Steve Webster
Last updated 08/15/06