How Technology Impacts a Classroom- Standard 12

How Technology Impacts a Classroom

Standard 12:

Evaluate and use technology for teaching and learning.

Standard Aligned Course(s):

EDTC6433: Teaching with Technology

Reflection:

EDTC6433: Teaching with Technology revolved around the five International Society for Technology Education (ISTE) standards.  Before taking this course, if someone had talked about any of the five ISTE standards, I would have been completely lost.  This class pushed my thinking about technology and how to use it in my classroom.  I knew I should be integrating technology into my classroom but I was unsure of how to do this so that it would have the greatest impact on my students.  I was unsure of how to integrate technology when not all of my students had access to the same quality of technology.

Over the past six years at Renton High School, we have been expected to integrate a slowly growing amount of technology into our classrooms.  As we adopt new curriculum, there are online components for home and classroom use.  The difficulty comes from the lack of updated technology in our classrooms.  We have access to one cart of computers for the entire math department.  With this, it was difficult to integrate technology based lessons in the classroom.  As I progressed through my technology class, I learned new ways to integrate small amount of technology into my classroom.

Where the most learning in this class occurred for me was in my new understanding of the ISTE standards.  The five ISTE standards from www.iste.org are:

1. Facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity
2. Design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments
3. Model digital age work and learning
4. Promote and model digital citizenship and responsibility
5. Engage in professional growth and leadership

ISTE Standard 1: Facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity

When thinking about this standard, I was pushed to think about how to increase technology use in a low technology classroom.  Since researching technology in low tech classrooms, I have come across some helpful articles and Tedx Talks that provide partial answers and ideas.  The first resource I found to help me process how to increase technology use when technology is not readily available, is from Stanford University (https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/scope-pub-using-technology-report.pdf).  It is titled Using Technology to Support At-Risk Students’ Learning.  Through this article my desire for more technology in my classroom and ideas for how to utilize the technology currently available to me has become more profound.  This article emphasizes the idea that technology can help close the achievement gap if used correctly alongside quality teaching (Darling-Hammond, et. al, 2014).  Working in a low income, high needs school, the gap in achievement between my school and the other two high schools in the district is apparent.  I am hoping I can find a balance in my use of technology, student directed group work, and teacher time that can help my students close the gap.  Another resource I found helpful was a TedxRainier Talk by Jessie Woolley-Wilson titled Blending Technology and Classroom Learning (https://youtu.be/o0TbaHimigw).  She talked about the importance of quality education being available to all.  Her big question was how do we make that happen?  She talked about the idea of blended learning and using adaptive learning programs in classrooms.  This talked left me with the question, is there an adaptive learning program for high school math?  Currently, I have not found a program that is adaptive and designed for high school students.

ISTE Standard 2: Design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments

This standard brought about the question, how can I create authentic learning experiences in my high school math classroom that incorporate contemporary tools and align with the common core state standards? Through my research I found an article titled Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment: A Research-Based Pedagogy for Teaching Science with Classroom Response Technology by Ian D. Beatty and William J. Gerace. This article talked about using CRS (Classroom Response Systems) to perform both summative and formative assessments of students. This article has given me a renewed desire to try and use technology for formative assessments. According to the article, “An assessment-centered learning environment weaves formative assessment deeply into the fabric of instruction, providing continual, detailed feedback to guide students’ learning and instructors’ teaching.” (Beatty & Gerace, 2009) I agree that class needs to be a constant place of assessment and adjustment. Having the technology to poll students throughout the class and adjust my teaching based off of their responses will not only give them a better education but help improve my teaching and awareness of my student’s level of understanding.  Since this class, I have used Kahoot! to help assess where my students are individually and as table groups.  We have done team competitions with math when not all students have phones or computers to use.  We have also done individual competitions in the upper level classes as a review tool for the AP or IB exams.

ISTE Standard 3: Model digital age work and learning

In my school, there are new teachers who are digitally literate, teachers who have been there a while but are keeping up with the changing technological times, and teachers who are reluctant to try any technology in their classrooms.  This standard led me to the question, how can I demonstrate knowledge, and skills around mathematical technologies available to help reluctant teachers create a dynamic and interactive math classroom? As a teacher, I work hard to constantly adapt my practice to fit the needs of my students.  Currently, the shift I am making is in technology.  I am working to bring the level of technology use in my classroom up to the level of technology use my students are looking for.  This is currently still a work in progress.  In my research around creating a dynamic classroom with the help of technology, I found an article titled No Teacher Left Behind: How to Teach With Technology by James Efaw.  This article talks about the three phases of implementing technology in a school.  It says that, “the three phases are learning, practice and feedback, and continued development” (Efaw, 2005).  As I have been working to get some of the veteran teachers on board with the technology changes I have noticed the same thing as Efaw did, “one of the biggest obstacles is the negative attitude of some faculty toward having technology in the classroom” (Efaw, 2005).  One of the key points in this article is that staff must be trained in the technology we want them to use, they need to practice using the technology they were trained on and then they need to receive feedback on their implementation.  Without those three steps the implementation of technology will fail.  In my school right now, we have occasional technology trainings but they are not focused or intensive enough to set a teacher up for success.  We are also not taking the time to visit each other’s classrooms to provide feedback to teachers making it hard for consistent technology implementation.

ISTE Standard 4: Promote and model digital citizenship and responsibility
This standard had two parts for me.  The first was the look into cyber-bullying and the impact it is having on our schools.  You can see the facts from 2016 in the chart below.  While they have changed since then, this is a snapshot of what cyber-bulling looks like for our students and it is only getting worse.  Students feel like the internet is a "safe" space where what they say cannot come back and hurt them in real life.  Throughout this program, I have made it a point to continue talking with my students about the difficulty the internet is currently presenting.

The second part of standard 4 was digital citizenship as it applies to academic honesty.  One of the challenges the accessibility of the internet has presented is plagiarism.  I work with juniors and seniors in the International Baccalaureate program to write papers around mathematical concepts.  When they are writing these papers, I work with them to make sure they are being academically honest.  When prepping to work with students on their research projects, I came across the article, “Is it Cheating or Learning the Craft of Writing?  Using Turnitin to Help Students Avoid Plagiarism.”  This article is by Lynne Graham-Mathesona and Simon Star.  This article talked about how to use turnitin.com to help students recognize what is plagiarism and what is not.  As I mentioned above, in my class, students must write a math internal assessment that is worth 20% of their IB math score.  For their internal assessment, students are expected to write a paper about math.  Students are aware of how to write papers for language arts and history because they do it all the time.  Math however is a completely different story.  In their minds the rules completely change.  Through my inquiry, I have found that turnitin.com can be used to help my students understand what is going to be considered plagiarism and what is not.  This year, a student tried to use another students paper as their own and turnitin.com detected it.  We were able to then follow the proper channels to hold students accountable for doing their own work.

ISTE Standard 5: Engage in professional growth and leadership

I am constantly striving to improve my instructional practice.  I am looking for professional development that I find useful and easy to implement into my classroom.  When I started researching how I could demonstrate the effective use of digital tools and resources as a department head to foster the growth of my departments professional learning communities and as a whole department, I thought of professional development.  As a department head I am always looking for ways to help my department grow and learn in their teaching practices.  The article I found, Moving education into the digital age: the contribution of teachers’ professional development, talked about how to design professional development to be meaningful for teachers.  The article stated that, “teachers (and learning) are often treated so generically that resulting TPD is not experienced as relevant” (Twining, Raffaghelli, Albion, & Knezek, 2013) where TPD stands for teacher professional development.  I am looking for ways to help make professional development opportunities relevant and worthwhile.  This is still at the top of my list for my department.  Next school year we will be moving to 1-1 laptops for students.  As we transition to this, there will need to be professional development on Canvas and other technology based programs.  We will need to adjust our delivery of content to incorporate and utilize our new technology.

As my school moves to a 1-1 laptop program, I have a steep learning curve ahead of me.  I will be keeping this information in the front of my mind as a plan and prep for next school year.

Other Artifacts:
Web Quest
Turnitin.com Article

Sources:

• Beatty, I. D., & Gerace, W. J. (2009). Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment: A Research-Based Pedagogy for Teaching Science with Classroom Response Technology. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 18(2), 146-162. doi:10.1007/s10956-008-9140-4
• Burt, R. (2012, February 9). The Educator’s Guide to Copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons. Retrieved November 20, 2016, from http://www.theedublogger.com/2012/02/09/the-educators-guide-to-copyright-fair-use-and-creative-commons/
• Darling-Hammond, L., Zielenzinski, M., Goldman, S, Using Technology to Support At-Risk Students’ Learning, 2014, Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education
• Efaw, J. (2005, January 1). No Teacher Left Behind: How to Teach with Technology. Educause Quarterly, (4), 26-31. Retrieved November 3, 2016
• Twining, P., Raffaghelli, J., Albion, P., & Knezek, D. (2013, August 5). Moving Education into the Digital Age: The Contribution of Teachers' Professional Development. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 29(5), 426-437. doi:10.1111/jcal.12031
• Woolley-Wilson, J., Blending Technology and Classroom Learning, 2012, TedxRainier