Well, this is my third blog and I feel as though I'm beginning to have a change of heart when it comes to technology in the classroom. To be honest, I have had a love/hate relationship with technology in my academic life. I consume technology, but the different technologies that have become so prevalent today were in their larval stages during my education and most of my teachers and professors had no idea how to utilize them. The result in the classes that tried to be "cutting edge" was that the class projects were just confusing, time-consuming and ill-conceived. I much preferred the teachers who stuck to their strengths and thus I preferred teachers using classical teaching methods. As a teacher I have been encouraged to utilize new technologies to stimulate and motivate my students and to make sure their academy education is relevant to their soon-coming college experience and the world that awaits them beyond. So much of the time though, I have been consumed by the smaller, less useful technologies that my students bring to my classroom - cell phones, ipods, etc - that only serve to distract. What I'm beginning to see after reading articles like Andrew Churches's "Welcome to the 21st Century," "21st Century Pedagogy," and "21st Century Assessment," along with J. McKenzie's "The 21st Century Skills Bookmark: A Dozen I-words Trump the 4 Rs," is that I've been focusing on the wrong things and I've failed to see the relevant possibilities technology offers for my classroom. This week, I was especially impressed with a podcast on iTunesU by Dr. Reuben Peuntedura called "TPCK and SAMR: Models for Enhancing Technology Integration. In this podcast, Peuntedura looks at combining technology, pedagogy and content (TPCK) to create a maximum effect in the classroom. He does this by breaking down our utilization of technology in the educational setting (SAMR). At the top of this blog there is a graphic that demonstrates the four levels of implementation. In this model, we can see his breakdown of the levels of implementation of technology in a classroom setting, with "Substitution" being the lowest level and "Redefinition" being the highest. To explain this further, I will use the example of journaling (something we do often in my English classes).
At the substitution level, students would simply keep a digital journal in Word or some similar program. There would be no functional change, but the medium would be different.
At the augmentation level, students would have a blog. The heart of the assignment is the same, but the opportunity to include different kinds of digital media and to receive feedback offers functional improvement over a digital journal.
At the modification level, students could use multi-media technologies like podcasts, youtube, imovie, etc., to redefine journaling and increase the depth of their experience.
Finally we have the redefinition level, which to me is the "wow" factor. Peundetura describes it doing something that "has never been done before." That's a big task and to be honest, I'm not sure exactly what that would look like for journaling. I believe that it would include the previous three levels of implementation, but would also feature other 21st Century Skills, like collaboration and global awareness. In my mind, taking journaling to this level would mean creating something like a wiki that would serve as a forum to help the class find common ground on a topic. Everyone would get to have input and the end result would be a product that represented the class on any given topic. This would enable them to take their individual analysis on a topic and contribute to a communal standard on a topic. By the way, if you're like me and were a bit in the dark about wikis, you might want to watch this short youtube clip:
I suppose overall, I'm beginning to see how technology can and will become a part of my curriculum. The exciting part is that I can envision how some of my less-than-motivated English students might become more engaged with some of the opportunities these new technologies provide.
Recently, the staff at my school spent a lot of time discussing the quality of the spiritual experience on our campus and those discussions helped me to rethink my approach as a teacher. The discussions helped me to refocus my vision for my classroom as a ministry. The ideas and articles that I've been consuming recently are helping me refocus my vision for my classroom in another way - I want to be very intentional about bring my students to Peundetura's level of redefinition. I see that I'm stuck with technology and that I'm hitting the augmentation level at best and I know my kids deserve more. I'm looking at my classroom for the coming year in an entire new light. I've got a lot to learn, but the payoff will be that my kids will learn a lot more too.
God blesses,
Jason
No comments:
Post a Comment