EDLD5364+Week+Four

This week was full of such good information for me this week. The extensive data about teacher professional development in the use and implementation of technology was wonderful. I would truly love a long term mentor throughout a school year to help me facilitate further technology integration in my classroom, rather than one-time professional development sessions where I "sit and get" information ABOUT techonolgy use. The importance of administrative leadership in technology learning, use, and implementation is huge. I have worked at a school where I marveled at my administrator's knowledge and use of technology, and I have worked at a school where I have to be the one to help my administrator to do some fairly simple things in the technology realm. An important measure of technology use and implementation in a school is student use and comfort level. We do not look at that enough, and it really should be the drving force behind why we are learning and using new technology in the classroom. In order to successfully implement technology, there has to be forethought and planning that will determine the goals of the program beforehand. During the process of implementation, there needs to be auditing and peer evaluation in order to constantly improve the process. One thing that I have seen done in a previous campus was the showcase of technology implementation results. Teacher and student work can be displayed not only in the school environment, but also in an open community showcase. This is highly motivating and tends to produce better products because students know their families and community members will have the opportunity to see their work. Technology tools to be implemented should be tools that help with productivity, communication, research, and problem solving/decision making.

Students also need to be involved in cooperative learning activities. This helps them be problem solvers, these activities tend to be product based, and they help develop students' social and collaboration skills. In the area of collaboration, students can also benefit from the use of more web 2.0 tools in the classroom. They can collaborate on wikis, they can journal and receive feedback on blogs, and they can produce their own products (while also being able to view and comment on those of others) in video sharing sites. I understand why these tools are often blocked in school settings, but I also think we need to open up more of these opportunities for students. These activities are reflective of the world that we are supposed to be preparing students to live in. As we assess student's readiness for their future worlds and jobs, we have to be assessing them in ways that truly reflect what they know and have learned. Traditional pencil and paper tests do that less effectively than other assessment instruments are able to do. Students who learn differently or express their learning differently will necessarily need different forms of assessment to display their learning. We tend to be good at understanding that students learn differently, but we also tend to think that all students need to be assessed in the same way. We need to provide similar supports in the arena of assessment that we apply in the instruction phase in order to have accurate data from the assessment. This will not only give us a better measuring stick for how we are teaching and how our students are learning, it will also help to increase student engagement.