Guiding Principles Revisited

For me, the key to successfully integrating technology into my teaching is to provide my students with a unique experience for learning, taking on challenges, interacting with data and collaborating with a wider audience that would otherwise not have been possible.

I realize that while learning technology skills will be invaluable to my students through out the rest of their academic and professional careers, I am a Science teacher first and I can't lose sight of the learning objectives by getting distracted with the newest educational technology fanfare. I really liked a quote I heard the week on a keynote speech by Chris Lehman: "Technology needs to be like oxygen: ubiquitous, necessary and invisible, we need to not think about it, it just needs to be there."

Guiding Principles for Integrating Technology into My Teaching More Efficiently:

1. RESEARCH: I need to know what's out there, keep up to date with emerging educational technologies and be aware of what tools the students seem comfortable with or are using/ learning in other subjects.

2. NETWORK & COLLABORATE: I will continue to network with other teachers who are already integrating technology into their classrooms successfully to get ideas and recommendations. This will include keeping up with Educational technology blogs and trying to give as much as I take, by replying to people's blogs and comments and asking questions.

3. FOCUS ON THE LEARNING OBJECTIVES FIRST: When planning for teaching a subject unit, I need to start with the learning objectives and then consider whether any could be taught more efficiently (eg. in terms of time, depth, student engagement) using technology, then find the tool that would be best for the job.

4. HAVE A PLAN: I need to make a plan which includes: the time frame needed for the tech-enhanced learning experience, what its execution/management would require from teacher and students, the degree of technology expertise among that specific group of students, any extra requirements to keep in mind: cost/ equipment/ class time, how I will wrap up the project and what form of assessment I will use (it would be important to include in the assessment process an opportunity for students to evaluate their learning- what they got out of the experience, what they would change, etc.)

5. TIME BEST SPENT?: Before embarking in the project I need to ask myself again whether it would be realistic and if its the best use of time, or whether learning objective could be taught achieved best using other more traditional tools that the students are already comfortable with. I also need to be aware of technology overload, I don't need to use every technological tool, every day, for every subject I teach. I need to streamline and aggregate my websites, blogs, wikis etc. so students don't get confused.

7. EVALUATION: I need to take time after the completion of the project to evaluate my own teaching practice critically by asking myself: How successful was the integration of technology in this particular Unit? Would I do use it again? How could it be improved next time? It is important that students reflect on their own learning experience as well.

If at the end of the technology-enhanced learning experience the students are more excited about the Science they learned than the technology they used, I will know that I have integrated the technology into my instruction efficiently.