Don’t view technology as just one more thing to add to your day.
If technology is something that you try to add after you have planned your reading, writing and math, you are destined to fail at “integrating” technology.
use technology when it allows you to do something in a better way than you have done before or to do something that was formerly impossible to do.
You can select a tool or app that will give your students an online audience for their learning and connect them with other classrooms and experts around the world. That tool may be as different as a classroom blog or Twitter or Skype.
My days with technology do NOT all run smoothly. Sometimes there are many stops and starts.
Sometimes a tool that I rely on will not work for some reason or other.
things don’t always run smoothly when I am teaching without technology either.
For anything that will become a learning routine in my early years classroom, whether it involves technology or not, I model, model, model it and then we practice it together until the students can do it independently.
Flexibility and a backup plan are important ingredients in any classroom, but particularly in a space that includes the use of technology.
My suggestion for people who are hesitant to use technology in significant ways is to start with one thing. Think of one way technology could enhance or deepen the learning in your classroom and then just try it. If you fumble and falter for a bit, keep trying.
To my six-year-old students, and in fact to all students in school today, computers, tablets, smart phones, interactive boards, etc. are not technology. They just are. It’s their teachers and parents who consider these items to be something new or unusual.
These tools have the power to become the stuff of teaching and learning if we will let them. Don’t think of them as technology. They are just part of the fabric of life around us. Students need to be shown how to use them to learn.
It’s an open secret in the education community. As we go about integrating technology into our schools, we are increasing the risk and potential for plagiarism in our tradition-minded classrooms.
But when does collaboration cross the line into plagiarism, out in the digital frontier of education?
At the same time, many of us want to put up barriers and halt any collaboration at other times (during assessments, for example). When collaboration takes place during assessment, we deem it plagiarism or cheating, and technology is often identified as the instrument that tempts students into such behavior.
Using tools such as Google Drive, students can more easily collaborate across distances and with conflicting schedules. Better yet for me as their teacher, I can actually view their collaborative efforts using the “revision history” function of Google Drive (Go to File → See Revision History). This allows me to see who contributed what and when. This way, I can track not only quality, but quantity.
what if we incorporated collaboration into our lessons and our assessments?
hould we ever stymie collaboration among our students? We live in a collaborative world. It is rare in a job, let alone life, that individuals work in complete isolation – with lack of assistance or contributions from anyone else. Perhaps as educators, it’s time to reassess how we want students to work.
We have all heard students complain that a member of the group has “contributed nothing.” Now there is a method to verify and follow up this complaint.
If you can Google the answer, how good is the question?
Perhaps instead of focusing our concerns on technology as a wonderful aid to plagiarizers, we should focus on its ability to foster creativity and collaboration, and then ask ourselves (we are the clever adults here) how we can incorporate those elements into our formalized assessments.
Unfortunately, yes, there will always be those students who want to cut corners, find the easy way, and cheat to get out of having to do the hard work. (See my post on combating plagiarism.) But a significant majority of students are inherently inquisitive: they want to learn and do better by engaging and thinking, not memorizing and fact checking. It’s up to us to appeal to that inquisitiveness.
How to build your own search engine using Google. Great for LS teachers who want to limit the sites their students can visit but also give the children an opportunity to learn how to search.