Tech Integration

In our school, we are lucky enough to have a tech integrator who will come to our rooms and teach you how to use the applications and programs contained on our laptops. She is extremely knowledgeable and is a great asset to our school.

Once I decided to use GarageBand for my unit, I knew that I needed help to understand the entirety of what this program could do. I did not want to rely on my own understanding of its possibilities and functions, so I scheduled a meeting with our tech integrator. We met this past Thursday.

It turns out that I had figured out much of what this application could do in just playing around with it at my house. This was an advantage for us because we were able to move on to other aspects of the projects that I had not yet thought about. Like, how do I want students to share their recordings with other students? Do I want to show them on an LCD projector, or did I want them to create MP3 files and make some sort of playlist on itunes?

The tech integrator and I discussed all of the possibilities and she had recorded questions that she needed to which she needed to find answers, we were done. We scheduled a follow-up meeting for the 23rd.

TPACK Chapt 6 (Social Studies)

I found the chapter entitled "Toward Democracy: Social Studies and TPCK" quite interesting. For one, the chapter raised a few issues that I had never quite thought of before. The first issues that I had never really put into a complete thought is that social studies, as a discipline, doesn't really have a distinct shape. Yes, there are subtopics like the ones mentioned in the chapter, but the discipline is pretty all over the place. This must make it challenging for departments to cover the variety of standards and subject matters involved.

Another issue that I had never thought of is that social studies is pretty much just what the name implies. Therefore, if we are to study societies we need to integrate technology into this subject matter in a major way. We need to do this because the newest members of our society, the newest generation of citizens on this planet have been majorly affected by technology. Whether societies have been affected due to the presence of technology or because of its absence differs depending on its geographical and political location, I'm sure. But the fact that technology has changed the cultural, political, and economic picture of every culture on the globe is pretty much indisputable.

Just think about our last election. When declaring his running mate, President Obama had the world waiting for a text message. Truly. We were all waiting, with great anticipation, the arrival of a text message that would tell us the name of the person who would be chosen to become second in command of one of the most powerful countries on this planet. Brilliant! As for countries where information is not so readily available, how much talk has there been about google's decision to conform to China's censored web searches? How many of us have seen footage of monks protesting against Myanmar's tyrannical regime? These examples show the power that technology has on our modern global culture.

Some of the challenges in using technology in social studies classrooms are outlined in this chapter. The one that I find the most frustrating is the lack of organization of historical materials on the web. Maybe this is due to the fact that I am not a social studies teacher, but I find that I spend way too much time looking for pictures, documents, timelines, etc. when I plan history-based lessons using the internet. I can only imagine what it feels like to be a student with less experience searching for relevant materials. Because of this, I do feel like we all need to spend more of our time teaching technology-based skills explicitly. Students come to use from a variety of backgrounds and some have limited experience in using technology. Or, some students may have developed horrible habits when using technology, such as plagiarism. I find that many students who plagiarize often do not know that they have done so and that they have no idea how to accurately give credit to another's work and/ or ideas. Simply teaching students about basic research skills could prevent some of this problem.

Finally, whenever I read about the necessity of using technology with students in any of the content areas, my mind automatically shoots out exclamation points because I know that not every teacher has access to technology in the ways that he or she would like. I know of many teachers who would love to integrate technology into their lessons on a more regular basis but find that the technology we do have access to is either unavailable or an extreme hassle. In some areas of the school, a laptop cart is available whenever you need it and in others you need to plan weeks in advance in order to sign up to use one. Also, more money needs to be spent on professional development for teachers in technology integration. We have workshops and demos here and there, but there has been no money for workshops and district courses for the last couple of years. I took a district technology course about four years ago. It was filled with teachers at a variety of levels of experience and it was super valuable for me and for others because we got individualized attention. More of this needs to be made available if we expect teachers to integrate technology-based lessons into their teaching repertoire.

Meeting with Colleague

Meeting with my colleague about our interdisciplinary unit was time well spent. It is sometimes hard to carve out time to have these important discussions in our every day teaching schedule. We met for most of a prep period last Friday and I think that it was a productive time for both of us.

We started the meeting by looking over my stage one, which my partner had yet to see. We found some corrections that needed to be made and talked about the progression of her unit in relation to mine. It is really exciting to think about the experience that we're creating for our students for next year. We have extended the collaboration of this one unit to a year-long course that we will teach in a collaborative fashion. Therefore, each of the units we teach in our English and history classes will correspond and correlate. This is super exciting because it will hopefully make for a more rich experience for our students and for us as colleagues.

An interesting layer to this particular collaboration is that my colleague is also taking a curriculum course right now at another college. She is using the same basic text that we're using, but we are getting differing messages about curriculum and how to use the book and workbook from our professors. We've basically decided to meet somewhere in the middle and use the planning guides and materials in a way that will work for us and for our students.

As far as leadership is concerned, the fact tat my colleague is also working from the same text helps tremendously. It is not like I am talking with her about ideas she has not heard. In fact, she is using the same process that we are using to create our unit. I feel like my colleague and I have already worked together for such a long time that leadership is not as much an issue as is being completely cognizant of what I'm envisioning so that I can put my ideas and my vision into words during our planning sessions.

Next week my colleague and I will be meeting with the head of the social studies department. This teacher has been collaborating with my colleague for some time on curriculum and planning for the junior history class that they both teach. Now, we are going to meet together to talk about the conceptual lens we've chosen to use for our classes next year. Also, I'm going to meet with the technology integrator to learn more about the Garage Band program. I've played around with it some, but I want to understand the entirety of what it can do.

It's interesting and cool to me that this one unit as opened up conversation between myself and several of my colleagues. My Alt Ed colleague and I are working more closely together on curriculum than we have in the past and we've reached out to include others in this process. Hopefully, this collective effort will translate to better instruction next year for all of our students!

TPACK (K-6 Literacy Edcuation)

In this chapter, the authors examine the relationship between traditional elementary literacy instruction and the necessity of incorporating technological literacy into today's literacy instruction. This chapter, appropriately subtitled "It's not that elementary!" acknowledges that there is no one solution or program that will work for all teachers, no matter the grade level they teach. I think that the authors of this chapter are extremely accurate in their observation that all it takes for a teacher feel efficacious in their attempts to integrate technological literacy into their repertoire is ONE successful technology-based activity that connects to their own philosophy and their knowledge of literacy. This type of success may lead the teacher to explore how other aspects of technology can be used in their classrooms.

In my own classroom, I tend to use technologies in my teaching that I actually use in my real life. Therefore, word processing, emailing, internet searching, podcasts, reading from online periodicals and newspapers, and blogging are everyday technologies I employ in my planning. I think that when we think about literacy instruction, it is important to realistically self-assess our own literacy and comfort with strategies before we attempt to use them with our students. If we can try to incorporate those skills, programs, and processes we already use in our daily lives into our classrooms, I think that the potential for real learning is possible. If we are forced to integrate programs that do not reflect the way we as adults use technology in the real world, then I think that we are setting ourselves and our students up for failure.

I do not think, though, that we should only integrate what we use and then stop there. We need to challenge ourselves to incorporate more technology into our daily lives and then reflect about the reasons why we use it and how it can best be shared with students. If our goal is to create more literate and functional students, shouldn't we walk them through the literacies we use as functionally literate adults? Also, some of our students (even the littlest ones) may be able to share their own use of technology in the classroom. I spend a lot of time with my friend's four year-old. This young guy is into computers and technology (and Dora the Explorer) in ways that seem obsessive at times, but whenever I think about the skills he's developing at such a young age I know that he's using technology in a way that is building skills that will open doors for him as a student in the future. He will go to kindergarten knowing how to operate a computer. He knows how to use a mouse and a keyboard. He knows how to navigate online games. He's used both a Mac and a PC. He interacts with characters and answers their questions verbally and with a mouse. It's amazing when you think about the advantages this little guy will have compared to those in his future kindergarten classes who have never used a computer. Imagine what a resource he will be to his peers (and his busy teacher!) when it's time to turn on the computers and load a program for an afternoon game online. In this way, technological literacies, as the authors of this chapter point out, have a great potential to be reciprocal and student-centered than do more traditional methods of teaching.

The chapter also gave some recommendations for programs and applications that can be used in elementary classrooms. They all seem viable resources in that they enhance the skill sets and literacy processes that students will need in later grades and as adults. Word processing, story mapping, and brainstorming activities are skills that I need my freshmen to be ready to use in the first week of high school. Like the computer-loving four year-old I spoke of earlier, I always hope that my students come to me with (at least) a basic knowledge of how to operate computers so that I don't need to start at square one with all fifteen of my freshmen.

What I saw most clearly when reading this chapter is that when we talk about literacy, we're really always talking about literacy K-12. Though this chapter addresses the needs of K-6teachers and students, the skills, habits, understandings, and the expectations don't really shift when these students enter middle and high school. After reading this chapter, I definitely see a need to continue learning about what the lower grades are using with students so that I can support their prior knowledge with like programs and processes when they comes to me as freshmen in high school.

Chapt 4 TPCK (E-TPCK)

In this chapter, the authors focus on the implications of emerging technology on the existing pedagogical and content knowledge of English teachers. For practical examples, the authors focus on preservice and novice teachers.

The first example of E-TPCK provided by the authors is that of a university in Minnesota where preservice teachers take content-area specific technology courses concurrently with content-based methods courses. In this way,like-content teachers are able to share practical ideas with colleagues. There are no math and/ or science teachers muddying the waters in this situation; it is purley for future English teachers. The university mentioned in this chapter goes even further to educate its preservice teachers in that it provides access to hardware and software that has been "purchased and upgraded" to promote the exploration and use of new technologies.

And yet, even with all of this exposure and access to technology, this model does not seem to produce technology-ready teachers. The authors point to several critiques of this program that point to its preservice teachers as unable to fit technology approriately into their planning and/or instructional schema. The auhors suggest that this may be due to the fact that these preservice teachers are meta-cognitavely unaware of their own understanding of technology and the relationship between technology (T) and pedagogy (P) and their own content knowledge (E-K). Therefore, these teachers who have taken a one-shot technology course and who've played around with some software have not yet realized how to accurately integrate technology and technological literacy into their actual classrooms.

This situation makes perfect sense to me. I remember my first year of teaching and the ways that I grew as a teacher during it. In that first year, I did not yet understand the realities of the classroom and the demands that teaching would put on me. Every year, I have come to realize and reassess new goals and objectives for my personal devleopment as a teacher. Technology was not initially at the forefront of my goal setting. It has now become a priority in my teaching, but there were so many other pedagogical and content related issues that took priority over technology during my first couple of years. Is that to say that I used no technology? Of course not. Webquests, CD making, videotaping, online research, and word processing were part of my teaching repetoire that first year. It was not until my third or fourth year, though, that I was able to set additional technology goals for myself and improve upon my skills.

I have to say that I completely agree with the authors' supposition that the number of veteran teachers who desire additional technology in their classrooms is a small number. In thinking about my own relationship with technology, I see that this is more than figuring out how to "add in" a few cool tricks here and there. If I'm not enhancing the learning experience for my students, who cares about the flashy new toy? I see veteran teachers all the time who siimply do not get this. They do not understand technology, are afraid of it, don't see value in it, make the wrong choices about where and what to add, and feel either defeated or falsely inflated about what their students have learned as a result of their efforts.

Could this be what is wrong with the university students in Minnesota as well? It seems like the instruction of all other literacies are done in a fairly purposeful way in most classrooms. English teachers have philosophies about the reading and writing processes, and yet some fail to see that technology is another type of literacy, albeit an emerging, ever-changing one. Just as we need to perfect our understanding of why and how we write and read, we need to be cognizant when thinking about the process of incorporating technology literacies into our classroom practice. Just as we push our students to interact with literature and to reveal themselves in their writing, we need to push ourselves to think about how we interact with technology and how it can enhance, not replace, the literacy learning in our classrooms.

Unit MLRs

E1 Historical Knowledge, Concepts, Themes, and Patterns

Students understand major eras, major enduring themes, and historic influences in United States and world history, including the roots of democratic philosophy, ideals, and institutions in the world.

E2 Individual, Cultural, International, and Global Connections in History

Students understand historical aspects of unity and diversity in the United States and the world, including Native American communities.
a.
Identify and critique issues characterized by unity and diversity in the history of the United States and other nations, and describe their effects.
b.
Identify and analyze major turning points and events in the history of Native Americans and various historical and recent immigrant groups in the United States, and other cultures in the world.

A2 Literary Texts

Students read text, within a grade appropriate span of text complexity, and present analyses of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry, using excerpts from the text to defend their assertions.

Indicators:

a. Analyze the characters’ external and internal conflicts.
d. Evaluate the theme or themes, whether explicitly stated or implied, in a literary text.
e. Identify, compare, and analyze recurring themes across works.

TPACK Chapters 1 & 2

I found the first chapter of the TPCK book to be very clear and direct. I appreciated the authors’ definition of technology because it included older forms of technology in with the new. I think that this definition is a comforting one in that it could help some to realize that we all already use some technologies in our daily lessons.

In addition to their definition of technology, the authors seemed to understand that there exists a baseline fear for those who have not themselves grown up with technology or who do not possess a huge interest or excitement for technology. Plus, even if you are someone who has used technology, it is an ever-changing field. You can never ‘done’ learning about technology, which must be a frustration for those who do not completely understand or feel comfortable with existing technologies.

In my reading of the first two chapters of this book, I really felt like its authors must have attended some of the technology trainings at my school. I thank the coordinators of these events because they are tirelessly chipper and often undaunted by the negativity and lack of morale surrounding these events. This started to all make sense, though, when the authors talked about the fact that introducing new technologies and/ or giving repeated trainings will not necessarily change the philosophy of the teacher who is resistant to integrating technology into his or her teaching. I had never thought of technology as a part of one’s philosophy, but it makes sense that it is absolutely part of the foundation of one’s every day teaching. If I am a teacher who believes that students should have actual books rather than photocopies of books for reading, I’ll make sure that it happens. If though, I do not place the same value on students having an actual book in their hands, I will place my attentions and resources elsewhere.

In the second chapter, the authors made the connection between changing technologies and changing workplace skills. Of course, it makes sense that as new technologies are developed to aid the work environment (the authors point out that this is, in fact, why new technologies are invented), new skills are required of workers in order to ensure success. For instance, I know have a friend who lives in Hollywood. She is an online journalist and completes most of her work via the Internet and her cell phone, and she records her interviews via podcasts. She is not from Hollywood, but from Strong, Maine. She grew up poor but with the skills and the interest to develop her understanding and use of technology.

Even though there are probably thousands of examples of poor, rural students who’ve made careers in technological fields and live fabulous lives, there are obviously many who are left behind. This issue is addressed in chapter two. I was struck by the statement that “even if the differences in the physical access to ICT were to be immediately erased, and all schools and families had high-end equipment...the differences in use would perpetuate the digital divide” (40). This makes sense when we think about the enormous amount of time, curiosity, and baseline knowledge it takes to figure out and to navigate new technologies. Just because I have a new program does not mean that I will understand how to use it or how it will be useful to me. This is why, in my opinion, we have a responsibility to integrate and encourage appropriate technologies into our teaching and into our lives.

The final aspect of this second chapter that connects to my teaching is idea that we need to differentiate between data entry and higher-level tasks for students. I have several students who are in classes where they are continually “practicing” skill sets and low-level functions using technologies. Then, I see and hear about other classes where students are thinking for themselves and truly building on skill sets and their technological abilities. Just because you use a computer in a lesson does not mean that your students are learning more about technology. There needs to exist some sort of understanding that students who are not encourages to stretch their skills and their thinking will become bored with technology and could be turned off from it. Using technology just for the sake of using is not appropriate. It needs to make sense in terms of curricular objectives and work to move students forward in their understanding and application of technology.