I have trawled the internet looking for rubrics that get to the heart of assessing interaction.  I would have even settled for something asssessing students interacting with each other but it doesn’t seem there is much out there.  Certainly Pip Cleaves’s site called e-assessment is the closest thing I’ve seen and does a great job of looking at assessment from a different angle.  However it tends to deal with one tool at a time.  As part of my research I would like to explore what happens when students have full control over the type of interaction, the media used and the way they excute that interaction.

Both the new ACARA (National Curriculum) and the latest advice from the NSW DET website talk about looking for the following things when assessing students use of ICT to perform literacy tasks.  The types of outcomes that we are looking at on this project are things like:

• Makes inferences including inferring meanings and messages using evidence from interrelated part of the text.
• Draws conclusions about main ideas, concepts and arguements
• Selects aspects of subject matter and particular language to represent people, places, events and things in ways that appeal to certain groups or audiences
• Creates written, spoken and multimodal texts for imaginative and informative purposes that contain vocabulary to show feeling and opinions, a variety of clause structures supported by appropriate punctuation to sustain meaning, reasoning and structure
• Builds a repertoire of ICT resources including use of design and editing software and equipment for creating specific texts for a range of purposes and intended effects
• An additional question we might ask that supports students focusing on building interactive text might include something like: Uses interaction in a way that supports engagement and achieves the intended outcomes of the activity

What are the indicators of a successful interaction?

• Understood the requirements and motivations of the person who is interacting with them
• Used creativity and innovation to build an experience that is engaging
• Used a structure that supports interaction such as story telling, information modules etc
• Was the sharing process easy and useful given the constraints of the time?
• What else?

What are the challenges of assessing interaction?

• What do you think the biggest challenges and opportunities are in evaluating student created learning?
• What do students learn from creating a sequence with more meaning vs one with more ICT creativity or interactivity?
• What do we notice about students designing at different ages?
• Can you see evidence of thinking, creativity, innovation and social skills in the execution of the designs? 
• How can we encourage students to actively interpret technology and match it to different communication requirements?

For more information on assessing digital learning the NSW DER Curriculum (DET Link) support advice on assessment for learning with laptops.