Louisiana edtech director talks about digital learning and assessment tools

Carol Mosley, like many state technology leaders, has to address a wide range of necessities in urban, rural and high-needs school districts across the state of Louisiana.

As the education technology director of the Louisiana Department of Education, one of her biggest challenges is supporting teachers with the digital learning tools and training they need, she told EdScoop in this interview conducted during the recent State Education Technology Directors Association’s national leadership summit.

While that has included efforts to find an adequate supply of devices to support one-to-one learning, hardware isn’t the end-all of the process, she said. “We’ve built a tiered approach” in pulling together resources “we can give reachers that are highly recommended, meets our standards, has rigor, and will bring students forward in their learning,” she said.

Similarly, Mosley is leading efforts to help teachers with their professional development, “who are struggling with this new digital world,” she said, with the larger goal of finding ways to “bring them up to be those teacher-leaders that we want all teachers to be.”

Mosley also shares how Louisiana is rolling out a single assessment platform “for formative assessments, to benchmark assessments to final summative assessments, so that kids have that continuum of similar testing environments” so the districts can better measure students’ progress.

And Mosley discusses how Louisiana has been taking stock of the technology opportunities inherent in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and looking at where to imbed technology to enhance learning opportunities.

Reach the reporter at wyatt.kash@ScoopNewsGroup.com and follow him on Twitter @wyattkash and @edscoop_news.