What did you learn from Chapter 5 and Chapter 6? One of the major themes of Chapter 5 was to have a plan for how the school wants to use technology and then a plan for getting the technology that best fits the needs of the school. These two parts of planning are often reversed, we get the technology first and then ask “how are we going to use this?” I have done this before with tech tools for my lessons, I find a really cool tool and want to use it even though it is not always the best way to teach something. Rarely is the tool completely useless for the lesson and students like a break from everyday routine, some good does come out of trying the new tool. I need to keep in mind the goals of the lesson when I choose the technology tools for my lessons just like schools need to keep in mind the goals of technology when purchasing it for school. I also think that the time it takes to learn how to use technologies should be considered. If it takes a long time to learn how to use something, teachers are not going to use it to its full potential. Teachers need training on how to use different tools too, YouTube is great for tutorials but not everyone will go out and look or know what to look for.
The last part of Chapter 5 on pages 67 and 68 stood out to me. I loved reading how the author went the extra mile for the school and the students. He took the time to listen to teachers' needs and investigated things the students were interested in, like Minecraft. I laughed out loud when he said he called tech support to fix a printer that was unplugged. In Chapter 6 the part that really stuck out to me was on page 75. PD has many forms, and not all of them take hours of commitment. It can be as simple as scrolling through twitter or talking to a colleague. I also felt that the author emphasized collaboration in this chapter. I enjoyed reading the story from Whitney and Robyn and how much collaboration benefited their school and students. I am excited to collaborate with other teachers and professionals as I begin teaching. I feel that collaboration has been a major part of adjusting to teaching during the current pandemic. Teachers are pooling their resources to help get the best education to the students and it is incredible to watch and be a part of.
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I liked this model because it is very straight forward. There are different roles that technology can play in the classroom and depending on the topic and standard that is being taught, different levels may be chosen. SOMETIMES it is okay to simply use technology as a substitute, but MOST of the time we should try and “teach above the dotted line.” I liked the graphic above because it provides some guides from Bloom’s Taxonomy for each level and that helps me to place a specific activity for my classroom.
I think that using this framework to evaluate how I use tech tools in my classroom will help me to ensure that I am using technology in a meaningful way and not just using technology for the sake of using technology. There are many resources and examples of ways people have used this model to enhance their teaching. I liked the example in the video provided that took the same assignment through the four levels. Concrete examples like that make the implementation of this tool easier. How does technology improve teaching and learning in your school? Technology allows for more student-centered instruction. The ease of collecting data with technology helps teachers and students to know exactly where students are at with learning different materials. In the classroom I am in right now we use Moby Max to track where students are grade-level wise and to help fill the gaps in learning that they have. We also have a couple of interactive whiteboards that we can use to project our materials and communicate information to our students. Each student has a computer that they can use during the day, this is a great resource for students as it allows them access to information. Technology allows us to show our students tutorials and show them where to access information if they are not understanding. We can use videos and other materials to enhance our lessons and provide students more real-world applications to what they are learning. What are some areas in which this could be improved? I think that often our interactive whiteboard is used as nothing more than that, a whiteboard. I would also like to find different activities for the students to use their laptops more not just for the sake of using their laptops but I think there are some great activities out there like Desmos and PearDeck that would help us get some more immediate feedback from our individual students. How do you go about making decisions about what technology to use in your classroom or school? I try to outline the goals of my lesson and then see if a specific tool would fit well to enhance the lesson. If the technology does not enhance the lesson I do not use it. I like to learn about a variety of different tech tools and what their pros and cons are so that I can make those decisions a little bit easier. My goal is to fit the tech tool to the lesson not the lesson to the tech tool.
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SPRING 2020 Archives
April 2020
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