Guiding Principles Part III (The Final Word)

This is pretty cheesy, but we all know how much teachers and students love mneumonics, so here is one I have created for myself to remember my Guiding Principles when integrating technology into my classroom...

Inform myself and become familiar with webtools available
Network to get ideas
Start with learning objectives
Plan from start to Wrap up
Idealistic? scrap
Realistic? go
Evaluate the learning experience

Questions I will keep asking myself along the way... (based on the Jeff Utecht article):

Will the technology be creating new and different learning experiences for the students by...

... allowing them to learn from people they never would have been able to without it?
...allowing them to interact with information/ scientific data in a way that is meaningful and would otherwise not be possible?
...allowing them to create and share knowledge with an audience they would never would have had access to without teachnology?... allowing them to learn from people they never would have been able to without it?

Is it a replacement for the way we do things or is it something completely new and pushes both the students and teacher to new heights, new learning and new knowledge?

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.

Guiding Principles Part I (8 Rookie Mistakes)

Rookie Mistake # 1. Diving right in without a plan

I would hear about a new Web 2.0 tool such as wikis or social bookmarking and within the next minute I would be trying to figure out in my head where I could squeeze it into one of my classes' syllabuses because it sounded so fun. I would become completely engrossed in integrating the particular tool to fit a unit without giving much thought to learning objectives for the unit. The result was usually that the students (and I) may have had fun messing about with the technology or gotten totally frustrated with it, but they certainly didn't learn anything extra about the topic at hand.
Tip: Have a plan. "It is only when a technology is combined with a particular teaching strategy that it becomes effective... and educational technologies must support existing instructional objectives in order to be effective." (Bell, Guess-Newsome and Luft, 2008)

Rookie Mistake #2. Not Thinking Through the Management Required

I would start the year with a great idea, such as an AP Bio class website where students could access all information related to the course... or a wiki for a Biotechnology class in which students would continue discussing controversial topics we covered in class... or a blog for an introductory Biology class where I could post "food for thought" questions each week and students would pick each other's brain to understand a concept better. But I would usually fail to think through about how much management would be required on my part to keep these up. The result= a great first couple of weeks, then other things get in the way and everyone forgets about the class blog, a few months into the year, a student asks "whatever happened to that class wiki we were putting together?" hmmm.
Tip: Before you start any sort of technologically involved project with your class, think about how much work it's realistically going to take for you to upkeep it and whether it is going to be too much for the students to manage on top of all their other assignments and classes. Think through the time frame for the tech initiative ahead of time (ie. will you use it for a whole unit, a couple of classes only or the entire school year?)

Rookie Mistake #3. Wasting Too Much Prep Time with Techie Pipe Dreams

If you're spending all your prep periods and several hours a night fiddling around with new apps you've heard about from your techie friends (or coming up with a cool background for your slides), you're probably not left with too much time for preparing the subject matter. Eventually you realize you don't have much of a life and you still have several lessons to plan for the following day.
Tip: Use your summer or professional development time to play around with the technology or attend conferences/ workshops about how to use it, it saves A LOT of time to learn from experts.

Rookie Mistake #4. Trying to Reinvent the Wheel

Yes, you've heard it before... If you're thinking about how cool you're going to seem to your students and the other teachers because you have integrated Twitter into your teaching (before you even actually do), changes are you are forgetting that many others already have and could give you some good pointers.
Tip: Instead of wasting time thinking about how to reinvent the wheel every time, invest the effort into networking with other teachers who have already implemented these strategies successfully.

Rookie Mistake #5. Not Investing Enough Time to Teach Students the Technology

Very often the amount of time required for students to master a piece of software for example does not make it worth using it in the class. On the other hand, if you are planning on using it across several topics through out the year, the time investment required to learn how to use it might be justified. I would also often assume that students were a lot more savvy with technology than they actually were... after all, it doesn't take master computer skills to update a facebook profile or send someone an IM.
Tip: It is crucial to determine how comfortable your students are with a particular technology tool before implementing it, I would usually realize this after I wasted several class periods showing them how to register for a website or upload a link.

Rookie Mistake #6. Bombarding Students with Technology Overload

I tried to integrate so many Web tools at one time that my students were getting confused about where they could find worksheets, post assignments or ask questions ("Ma'm, do we get that from the blog, the wiki, your personal website, our First Class folder?")
Tip: One thing at a time... and it's okay to still use traditional methods! ("Extra worksheets are on the bottom drawer of my desk, Jimmy").

Rookie Mistake #7. No Explanation Regarding the Use of a Gadget

Students need to understand the purpose of a technology and the reason behind using it in the classroom Looking back I realize I hardly ever discussed with them why I decided to try a specific webtool and how the activity would satisfy a particular learning objective.
Tip: Be ready to answer the question: "Why do we have to do this?" and have an answer for it that would satisfy an administrator who has read "Evaluating Technology Use in the Classroom" by Jeff Utecht (www.thethinkingstick.com)

Rookie Mistake #8. Inadequate Evaluation of the Tech-based learning experience

This could be in terms of assessment (I didn't really ever think of how I would assess the students' participation in the tech-based learning experience until after it was completed- then I was usually satisfied enough that they made it through and met the basic requirements (eg. replying to a post or uploading their end of unit project... not too much formative asessment there...). It is also important for students and teacher to reflect on the experience and think about what they learned from it, what went well and what they would change for next time.
Tip: Before you embark in a tech-based learning experience, think about how you want the end result to look like, how you're going to wrap the project up and how you're going to evaluate it.

Guiding Principles (The Prologue)

The main problem that I faced in the past with regards to using technological tools in my teaching is that as the book Technology in the Secondary Science Classroom puts it, I'm definitely one of those people "who enjoy new gadgets and [are] tempted to integrate technology into the science classroom for its own sake."

In trying to come up with my "new and improved" Guiding Principles for integrating technology more efficiently into my classroom, I will first reflect on my own experience with it the first time around and try to summarize the "rookie mistakes" I made. They may come in handy to others and hopefully the exercise will help me develop a more solid set of guidelines to refer to when using educational technology in the future.

(See the next post for a list of "Rookie Mistakes" revisited)

Summer Adventures in WebTools for Teachers

I'm starting this blog to track my progress in learning how to integrate educational technologies more efficiently into my teaching (as part of a summer class through MSU called WebTools for Teachers).

I recently taught for a few years at a very "techno-friendly" school where each student was required to have a laptop and teachers were encouraged to make regular use of information technology in their teaching and in communicating with students, so I am not completely new to all this. However, I still feel very much overwhelmed and lost among the educational technologies of the 21st Century.

When I was first introduced to this "high-tech" learning environment, the computer became an additional vital organ for me, something I just couldn't live without. I took on board every web tool and software program that was introduced to us by the ICT specialists and figured out how to use it in my class: personal web page, wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, software for making online surveys, movie making software, audio editing software, iStop animation, brainstorming programs, podcasts, news feeds... I realized I was probably not using the technology very efficiently when students started to become confused about where to go online to get assignments for my class, participate in online discussions I had set up, ask questions, etc. because I had so much going on at once. I was getting carried away by virtual gadgets and was way over my head in trying to manage them all.

I am hoping that this journey revisiting how to integrate technology into my teaching will help me find a more clear sense of direction when using some of the web tools that are available to teachers. The questions that I want to try to answer are:

• What is out there?
  
• How could I use it in my teaching?
• Would it REALLY enhance my teaching/ my students' learning or just create a distraction?