Interview with an ELA teacher

I interviewed an 8^th grade ELA teacher.  She is very frustrated with the technology platforms provided by the school meant to help and assist instruction.  Her feeling is that these programs prohibit/limit effective use of classroom time and often provide students with poor feedback.  The school subscribes to a web based writing assessment program called MYAcess.  Its selling point is that it provides students and teachers with real time feedback on their writing.  Students receive scores on their writing based on the ELA standards, which include focus, meanings, organization, content, mechanics, and language use.  Some of the issues mentioned by the teacher using the program was that access to the site for the first month and half of school was so poor that days of instructional time were lost in the computer lab due to various reasons which included compatibility/upgrades that were not made.  In addition, throughout the year after these initial kinks were worked out, students were finding ways to “out smart” the system and found that if they copied their essays twice, one right after the other, the computer give them a higher score then what they deserved on the original essay.  I could easily see the frustration on this teacher’s face.  She was trying to implement a system that was mandated by the school to use, however the assessment data was so often flawed that she couldn’t use the site as a reliable source of data.