Evaluation of educational technology it takes a lot of time...

After reading chapter 7 I was a little taken by it. Evaluating educational technology is an evaluation like anything else. As I was reading through the numerous rubrics, I thought this is a little too extensive for me. I think we spend to much time on the assessment process and we lose too much time teaching what students need to learn. I know that in Newburgh School District that they spend a lot of time getting ready for bench marks and then finally taking them. I was told by an administrator at an elementary school that they waste a month plus out of the whole school year simply by getting ready and taking care of these tests. After reading the technology rubrics I was like, wow.
As a society as a whole we need to stop testing every little thing. Not every student does well in a test situation and not every student will excel at the levels that we want them to. I did like reading what James Gee had to say about video games. The statistic was that 92% of all students in the K-12 setting spend at least 20-30 minutes per day playing video games. I'm sure that the number is much higher. Video games work on hand eye coordination, kids have to analyze, evaluate and make an on demand decision about what to do next in their game that they are playing. I don't think it's too much to ask students to spend less time on video games, however that seems to be a more societal problem. Parents are ready to throw their children in from of the t.v. so that they don't have to be bothered.
I also remember reading about Sim City which was quite the popular game growing up along with Oregon Trail. Both of these games one had to solve problems. For example in Oregon trail one had to remember how much food they need for their trip, how long to rest, and when to keep going on his/her travels. Another popular game was Where is Carmen San Diego? We always had a computer in all of our classes with those floppy disk. We loved playing on the computer during recess and we used to compete for it at the end of the day as a reward. It was a form of video games, therefore it was used as a way to keep behavior in check in the classroom as well as a reward factor for others.
I like the program inspiration and how one can lay ideas out in it. I think it is a visual stimulate that goes well in the classroom for everyone. Also another program that has been very successful is Leap Frog. It has engaged lots of young children in the learning process. When we were kids we had programs to learn from too. We had computer hand held games that were red, yellow, and gray from Texas Instruments that had different level cartridges in it to practice our skills on. I think back and that was our "digital learning."
Like I have stated earlier that we spend to much time on assessing where we are instead of teaching and working with what we have. We have become to much of a proactive society and prevent problems that we have not yet met from occur! That my friend is absolutely crazy indeed! We need to work with what we have an hope that what we are teaching will go along with their life long learning process.