Standard 10 Meta-Reflection: Technology

Standard 10 Technology: Integrates current technology into instruction and professional communication/collaboration activities where appropriate.

I developed a class website using the SWIFT template to communicate with parents and students. I upload electronic copies of assignments and projects for students to access if they lost their copy or for parents to access. I also provide a weekly homework calendar with our daily activities, special events and due dates. Lastly, I write practice quizzes for students to take preceding an assessment to aid in their preparation. This has proven to be a vital source of information for parents and students as well as a worthwhile communication tool for me. I update this on a daily basis during the school year and include assignments which require students to access the website.

Artifact: Class Website

This blog post for an educational technology shows how various internet-based applications could be used in the classroom to differentiate instruction. I have used some of these applications in my classroom such as Inspiration to develop flow charts for note taking and iMovie for student-created video projects. These applications help students to master technology standards in the context of content standards because they are used in the classroom daily and as options for project products.

Artifact: Differentiated Instruction with Technology

I also used a program called VoiceThread to demonstrate a technology tip for a collaboration and communication tool called Jing. I showed how this piece of technology could be used for educators to collaborate on a common assessment or for students to work on a project together using the internet. The opportunities for this program and others like it are endless given the appropriate technology.

Artifact: Technology Tip

Internet Safety

As the web 2.0 becomes a part of school curriculum, issues such as personal internet safety need to be addressed. Many students feel a false sense of security online because they have experience on social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace. Sites such as these offer built in security options which limit the amount of information others can see. However, when students post information to a public site such as a class blog, discussion board or other media, it is open for everyone to see if not protected properly.

The first step teachers need to take is educating their students about how to prevent personal information from getting on the web. The OSPI website offers links to resources including iSafe. The next step is for teachers to protect the sites by requiring registration and teacher approval before access is granted or a password known only to students. Teachers should also monitor these sites and remove any personal information such as pictures with names, personal details such as where students live and any other information which could identify individual students.

As teachers, we have a responsibility to keep our students safe. OSPI has also included it in their standards (Educational Technology EALR 2.1- Practice Safety: Demonstrate safe, legal and ethical behavior in the use of information and technology.) We have monthly fire drills, intruder drills and even an earthquake drill during the school year. Teachers also need to education students about how to keep themselves safe while on the internet.

Differentiated Instruction with Technology

Good teachers are able to use students’ differences to their advantage. These teachers avoid the easy “one size fits all” approach and seek to engage each student as an individual. This is commonly done by teaching to different learning styles or incorporating students’ interests. This can also be done using technology.

All teachers have projects that involve a presentation or written report. These appeal to only a select few learning styles and the others have to suffer through it. Take for example a book report. The students who learn by reading and writing do fine while the visual learner wants to draw pictures or a flow chart and the physical learner can’t sit still long enough to write a full paper. Below are some programs that could be used as alternatives to a written report for various learning styles.

Group learner- Post the report on a blog and have other students leave comments. (WordPress)

Kinesthetic learner- Act out an important part of the book on video and tape yourself explaining the significance of it. (video editing such as iMovie)

Visual learner- Create a flow chart showing the connections and important events for each character in the book. (Inspiration)

Aural learner- Record yourself explaining a significant part of the book and then let other students record their own observations and comments. (VoiceThread)

As you can see, these are only a few options teachers could use. The goal is to start with an existing project and find appropriate technology that enhances it. The focus should be on the content and learning goals while the technology merely engages students’ interests and learning styles.

Technology Tip

This is a technology tip I created about the Adobe Buzzword program. Buzzword is a web based collaborative word processor which allows users to share, edit and collaborate on documents online.

more about “Technology Tip“, posted with vodpod

PowerPoint Alternatives

Many teachers use presentations in their classrooms as a way for students to research and present information to their classmates. The most popular form of presenting this information is either PowerPoint or posters. The problem is these are usually the only two mediums students use and many don’t even use them well. There are  alternatives to PowerPoint and posters out there for students to use. I recently had two students think outside the box and created a fake MySpace page for a deceased physicist using PowerPoint (Niels Bohr MySpace). What a creative way to show information! There are other alternatives such as videos, ScreenCast, VoiceCast, Jing, and as mentioned before, Scratch for younger students.

Secondly, students are not being taught how to create good presentations. How many PowerPoints have teachers seen where there are 20 animated GIF’s jumping around bright yellow font that is difficult to read and two paragraphs of text copied from Wikipedia. As teachers, our job is to not only teach research skills and public speaking skills, but also how to properly use technology to present information. Let’s think outside the box and give our students more options than the traditional ones. They have imaginations that get used less and less the further they progress in school. Many of them will be asked to be creative in the work force and college, they need to be practicing those skills in all their high school classes.

Internet Access Issues

I encountered a common experience with technology this week- access availability. We moved into a new house and the internet is not working yet. I was unable to access Blackboard to complete my class assignments at home and had to find alternative access. I gained more empathy for students who have the same difficulty accessing the internet. As teacher attitudes toward technology change and it is used more and more in classrooms, these issues will become pertinent. What should a teacher do if the student does not have access to the internet? We saw a video about how a girl used her cell phone to access the internet but that only works with certain applications such as Facebook and Twitter. Here are my thoughts regarding student internet access:

• Alternative access points: These could be school computer labs, the teacher’s classroom computer, local library or even a local Starbucks (which offer 2 free hours a month when you register a Starbucks card).
• Flexibility in due dates: I am not advocating a new version of “the dog ate my homework” excuse but the fact remains that technology fails at times and students cannot be held responsible for that. A policy such as informing the teacher at least 24 hours before the assignment is due via email, voicemail or parent note will let the teacher and student come up with solutions and eliminate bogus excuses.
• Alternative assignments: Lastly, when all other solutions are exhausted, alternative, technology-free versions of the assignment should be prepared but not advertised to students. This allows the student to learn the same material without technology. This should only be used in cases where all other options have been tried.

As teacher beliefs toward technology change and it appears in more classrooms, access issues will appear and teachers need to have a proactive strategy in place to deal with them in a fair and consistent way. Sharing these with other teachers will help them avoid similiar problems and change teacher beliefs about technolgoy in schools.

Starbucks offers 2 free hours of Wi-Fi access a month.

Wikis In Science Classrooms

Wiki technology provides opportunities for collaboration around a common topic or subject with unlimited individuals contributing to a page. While wikis such as Wikipedia have been criticized by some as unreliable, many others see the potential of this addition to the Web 2.0. Anyone can edit it and contribute their own knowledge to a wiki. Some argue that wikis allow contributors to add whatever they want, right or wrong, the beauty is that another contributor can correct it. Wikis are self-policing.

Science has been doing this for quite awhile although not as streamlined and accessible as a wiki. When a research article is published in a journal such as “Nature”, the methods and results are published so that other scientists can recreate the experiment to check its validity. An experiment’s conclusions are invalid if they cannot be replicated. This is a foundational component of science. Bad research is quickly identified and good research is validated and usually  improved.

A purpose of the classroom is to prepare students for the work force. Students who want to enter a scientific field need to gain experience having their work critiqued by others. A wiki would allow students to post their results from an experiment and have other students try to replicate their experiment. A discussion could then begin between the two groups about necessary changes to the experiment.

Wikis can also be useful for teachers. I found this wiki using a quick Google search for “physics wiki”. It provides teachers with labs for different physics units. Teachers can discuss what worked in the lab, how they changed it, and how to extend it.

As our world becomes smaller, collaboration is going to play a larger role in our jobs. We will not only be working together with people in the same building but across the world. Wikis provide students with the opportunity to practice the skills necessary to be a contributing member of the global community. They have to be responsible for the content they put up and thoughtful about the feedback they provide to others. This is a skill we can begin developing in schools using wikis.

Bridging the Divide

The article we read this week suggests there is a divide between teachers who  use web 2.0 technology and those who don’t. It is suggested the main cause for this is lack of time. No one disputes teachers don’t have enough time but I don’t think that fully explains why more teachers aren’t using these tools. I would like to suggest a reason the more experienced teachers don’t readily accept new technology is because they have seen it come and go before. Let me provide you with an example.

When I started teaching four years ago in the Highline School District, technology was hard to come by. I had a desktop computer and that was basically it. Four years later, in the Kent School District almost every part of my job has been effected by technology. I’ve made a list below of what I used at Highline four years ago and what I use at Kent today.

• Overhead projector –> Digital projector
• Whiteboard –> SmartBoard
• Microsoft PowerPoint –> SmartBoard Notebook
• Gradebook Pro –> Skyward (Online tool)
• Paper attendance sheets –> Skyward
• Actual calendar –> Outlook

I am only a new teacher so I can imagine how the more veteran ones feel. It seems like technology changes every few years so what is the point in developing new curriculum if something new will come along to replace it. New and more technology is not always better. Our district has put a SmartBoard in every room. These are amazing tools and I am not complaining that we have them. However, they are difficult and cumbersome to use at times when a whiteboard would work better. Also, the board is compatible with PowerPoint which all my lessons are in but the district is providing training using new software called Notebook which integrates better with the SmartBoard. In my opinion, this isn’t an improvement and I don’t want to transfer all my PowerPoint lessons over to Notebook only to have it go away in a few years.

My point is that technology is not always the best thing for the classroom. There are  good reasons some teachers are not jumping on the bandwagon. I tend to wait and see if the technology will sustain the test of time and not go the way of the laser disc.

That being said, I don’t think all new technology should be avoided. Blogs, discussion boards, websites and instant messaging have stood the test of time and could be incorporated into classrooms. Education is a field constantly changing and teachers know how to deal with that more than most. Web 2.0 has some great tools to offer and we should do everything we can to advocate for more teachers to use some of these tools.

SmartBoards are new pieces of technology that allow you to use the computer by touching the screen.

Teachers, not Technicians

In the article “Teachers, not Technicians”, the authors focus on some keys school districts should follow to help teachers integrate technology effectively into their classrooms. The author’s main criticism of many school districts is that the focus is on how to use the technology and troubleshoot problems rather than how to develop better curriculum.

My classmates and I have some interesting thoughts on these suggestions. First, some kind of technical training must be done to simply allow teachers to navigate the new software or hardware. This could be done in a variety of ways such as a video presentation, written steps or a live tutorial. The majority of time and funding training teachers to use the new technology should go toward integrating it into the curriculum.

The Kent School District has this opportunity. Thanks to a recent technology levy, all incoming 7th graders are being given personal laptop computers to use for the school year. The laptops will follow those 7th graders through middle school and into high school. In five years time, all students from grades 7-12 will have laptops. This will mark a significant change in classroom instruction and the school district should follow the advice of the researchers. Rather than showing teachers how to troubleshoot laptops, time should be spent giving examples of how to use the laptops to enhance curriculum. In a science classroom for example, probeware such as Vernier could be used with the laptops to gather, analyze and graph data from lab experiments. Students would be much better served if troubleshooting was left to technicians and teachers were allowed to teach their curriculum.

This classroom is lacking technology integration.