Comments on Interactivity 5

So Blogger has been doing this funny thing where it tells me I'm logged in until I look at another person's blog. And when I go to sign in from their blog, I'm redirected to the blogger home page and the cycle repeats itself. (And I've looked up every form of help I can think of and have been unable to find a solution.) Don't you just love it when technology glitches?

Since I am apparently incapable of commenting directly on my colleagues blogs, I will post my comments here and hope that they will see it. (And if my comments did go through and I'm just unable to view them for whatever reason, I'm sorry about the comment-spam.)

To Alex:

Your post was the first that I read and I was very surprised to see that a public school teacher was completely unaware of the technology standards. I had begun this assignment assuming that public school teachers must be aware of these standards and were probably required to implement them, but what I’ve seen so far indicates that they aren’t. It’s at least a step in the right direction for teachers to recognize the importance of technology in relation to the core standards and I thought it was really interesting for the teacher you interviewed to make that connection. 

To Morgan:

It's really interesting that even teachers who make technology a vital part of their classroom are unaware of these standards. Given that so many teachers are incorporating technology into their lesson plans, maybe they are already following the standards unwittingly. If so, that's pretty awesome. But if not, the standards should be implemented in order to ensure that students are prepared in knowing how to use technology not just for the sake of technology but as tools to aid them in creative and analytical ventures.

To Jessica:

You raise a really good point in saying that the teacher you interviewed was in a district that was not technologically advanced and so it wasn't surprising to you that he didn't know the standards. Speaking as someone who attended a high school that tried to have as much advanced technology as possible,  it's really easy to take technology for granted and assume that every school has access to the latest technology. But a lack of funding, training, or technology itself is certainly a problem for many districts. It's easy to say that schools need technology and teach students how to use it in alignment with the standards, but figuring out how to do so in an area that doesn't have the resources to support it must be a very difficult task.

Interactivity 5

                The teacher I interviewed is currently employed at a private high school that is under the jurisdiction of the Diocese of Metuchen. She presently teaches 11^th and 12^th grade English classes on the College Prep, Honors, and Advanced Placement levels.

                When I began the interview with a brief bit of background information on this assignment being for a class on technology in the classroom, the teacher did not appear to be surprised by the topic. Based on the information she has given me, technology has been a strong aspect of education in this particular school since she began working there about five years ago and has continued to increase in its importance.  When I specifically asked her about the NETS-S and NETS-T, she seemed more surprised that I knew that there were standards for technology than she was about being asked about the standards themselves. She was very knowledgeable about the standards, citing them as the latest area of focus for the entire school that is being strongly pushed by the school’s new administration.

                In recent years, the whole school has been very focused on implementing the NETS-S and NETS-T. The school has adopted the slogan “Educating for the 21^st Century” to reflect their new-found forward-thinking emphasis on technology. This has been an ongoing process, beginning a year or so before she started teaching at the school with the policy of all teachers being assigned a laptop provided by the school. With the laptops, teachers became required to use online grade-books that allowed students and their parents to view their grades and attendance. In her years teaching at the school, she has witnessed the introduction of online courses offered as electives, the introduction of the web-based tool Moodle, students being assigned laptops, and a change in curriculum to increase the amount of Technology classes required for graduation.

Although she focused more on the school’s overall emphasis on incorporating technology than how it is used in her own classroom, she did mention that it was required for teachers to meet both Common Core Standards and The National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers and Students. Given that she teaches at a private school, I wasn’t sure if the standards still applied so I was surprised to see how important they were in this particular setting. The teacher stated that the Diocese wants to ensure that their schools are aligned with the standards because it both asserts their credibility as an academic institution and gives them a competitive edge by using their focus on technology as a selling point to boost enrollment.

As a future educator, I would focus more on how students use technology to reach the standards and less on how much technology is used in general. If the whole purpose of the NETS-S is really to use technology as a tool for enhancing students’ creativity, communication, and critical thinking skills, then they should be discussed with those intentions in mind. 

Click Here to Access Revised Spreadsheet with NETS-S Listed 

Cell Phone Polling in the Classroom

                Over the course of the last four or so years, I’ve noticed an increase in the amount of presentations that include polls conducted through text messaging technology. I’m not sure if there’s a specific term for this technology or how it works exactly. From what I understand, people in the audience send a text message to a certain phone number that contains either a number or a code word and then a poll is generated through the magic of technology based on the code words/numbers received. I have seen this system being used with audiences ranging in size from about 30 people to over 6,000.

 After seeing it be used with a variety of audiences, I began to wonder how this system would play out in a classroom setting.  This method of polling would allow students to answer questions in a timely manner while enabling them to use one of their most beloved technologies (their cell phones) in the process. The use of cell phones as a medium for communication in the classroom would also help more introverted students have their opinions counted. It would certainly be useful for getting student input for simple things (such as "Which book should we read next?") that would allow students to have some level of influence in what's going on in their classroom.

While the texting-polling system is great for gleaning simple input from many students at once, it isn’t without drawbacks. With a poll, the answers would be pre-determined and may detract from getting responses accurate to what students would verbally say in response. There’s also an element of social interaction to polling—seeing what your peers like or don’t like, what they want, how they feel, and who thinks or feels what—that a generated poll simply can’t convey. With that said, I think this relatively new method of polling could be great in a large class if used sparingly for simple questions that rely on student input.

Interactivity #4

URL to Spreadsheet: Lesson Plan Spreadsheet

                I chose the lesson plan “All’s Well that Sells Well: A Creative Introduction to Shakespeare” because I found the idea of connecting Elizabethan theater to modern movies via commercials to be alluring. The activity prompts students to make connections between Shakespeare’s time and the modern day, which incite students to better understand the audience that Shakespeare’s plays were originally intended for. Given that Shakespeare is a classic staple of any high school English course (and one that students often struggle with), this seemed like a great topic for a lesson plan.

                The primary objective of the assignment is for students to: compare and contrast The Globe Theater with a modern movie theater based on research and their own experiences, and create an advertisement of a modern product targeted to an Elizabethan audience at The Globe Theater. Many standards are listed as relevant to this lesson, but some of the standards are only weakly linked. For example, standard 9-10RI 1 (Citing textual evidence to support analysis) may be involved in students analyzing the similarities and differences of The Globe and modern theater, but it is not explicitly mentioned in the project handouts. The teaching strategies were largely student-centered, relying on graphic organizers and outlines for students to fill out rather than direct instruction from the teacher. Perhaps with a bit more instruction from the teacher, the connections between the standards and the lesson objectives would become clearer and students would have a better idea of what is expected of them.

Technology is initially incorporated through the use of a virtual tour of the Globe Theater, which is essential to the assignment by allowing students to visualize the Theater for their comparison. While the original assignment called for students to act out a commercial, I included the option of utilizing technology (either Powerpoint or a video-editing software) to produce a commercial. These technologies allow students a better medium to display the knowledge they have gained from their research via writing skills while providing them with an opportunity to practice presentation or video-making skills that can serve them well beyond life in a classroom.