Technology has never been more useful especially in the field of the feedback that matters to students as it should to teachers and the whole education society. Today we have the technology, recursive feedback, and commercial opportunities tied up all together in the same place.

How long can we confine our students in the bonds of standardized assessments that at best rule out the real potential of about half of our students? Most of us have been working for a while now, whether in education or any other field, and we do know that some of the least things we have used in our professional lives are the things we were tested in, especially in exams like SAT, IGCSE, etc. I am not saying these exams are useless, but all I am saying is that they are overestimated and overvalued.

I have tested some software, LMS systems, and social media platforms and used them in my classroom, and they proved to be very useful in the formative feedback, especially when they are open-ended and linked to as much freedom as possible from the side of the students. The educational technology canon in the commercial world is about testing and assessment techniques, automated tests, some teacher-free software that tell schools what students score, but not how they perform. Schools go ahead and build their students’ performance reports based on mere numbers automated by some teacher-free machine.

Once again, I am not saying these technologies are wrong; they have made a lot of things much easier for us to do. What I am trying to say is that technology providers are commercial companies after all, and they provide what is needed in the market, in our case, the educational market. It is our responsibility to figure out what we need technologies to help us with, the new, unprecedented affordances we have today that were not possible in the past, and I would dream that one day we can do without summative assessment, which is the hot topic of every educational congregation today. We cannot wait for commercial technology providers to change the way we educate our students using their tools; what we should do is have them build their technologies to serve our educational goals and purposes.