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.

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)