After having a joke fall flat in my Algebra class, a student leaned over to me and whispered “Tell it to us again, it will be funny this time.”

But this week, at our monthly math department meeting, I presented practice problems for the second time from the Smarter Balanced Assessments.  This time from the training test, a short 8-question test.  From the look on my colleagues face, there was nothing funny about what they saw.

The discussions that followed were not so much about the math as they were about how our students are going to be able to understand and access the technology involved in calculating and entering a solution.  With only a minimal amount of experience on the Chromebooks, would our students remember where to find the calculator?  Would they understand how to group expressions with appropriate parentheses?

On April 22nd and 23rd our school will be taking the new summative (Common Core) assessment by Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC).  We hope the joke will not be on us.

As we near the inaugural assessment, anxiousness grows among the administrators and teachers at our school and, I’m guessing, at many schools across our great state.  Our school wasn’t part of the Field Test of the assessment because we didn’t have enough computer labs, nor did our technology infrastructure support mobile wireless carts.  Chromebooks arrived just this year to provide roughly a 1 to 4 student-to-computer ratio.  Our wireless infrastructure was updated and many teacher’s desktops were upgraded from Windows XP.  We are now ready to go … or are we?

As the Common Core coordinator for my department, I took special care in making sure that our teachers new what was on the practice SBAC exams.  We worked in teams and examined the 7th, 8th, and 11th grade practice exams.  We discussed where our students might struggle with the mathematics, the technology, or both.  I created lists of vocabulary words from the middle and high school practice tests and passed them out to the whole school.  We assembled 2-inch binders with information that would help us transition.  Many PLC mornings were dedicated to being prepared for the assessments.

Let the Common Core assessments begin.

The SBAC assessment folks assume that the test takers won’t be under additional mental stress when using “drag and drop” procedures, or using the notepad, or locating the calculator and using it’s numbers and symbols.  But our students, whom many have no computers or internet, have not developed a comfort level where there won’t be significant mental demand just operating the Chromebook.  Many of our teachers also share that discomfort and are making every effort to give students more practice time with the computers.

Are the new assessments a catalyst for change in the use of technology?  Absolutely.  Are we ready for that change? Probably not, but it’s here, and on April 22nd and 23rd a new era of technology in education will drive it’s way into our classrooms.