Over the past two years I have been hearing a lot about the
three Rs, Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships. I know it is spreading. When I
go to my boy’s school it is there too. The question I ask is, what do I need to
do to get there? Part of what my district is doing to move toward the three Rs
is an interview process. When the interviewer came to our building, technology
was the talk of the day.
How can technology help? Oh
let me count the ways. To help organize my thoughts, I will use the National
Technology Educational Standards for Students. In short form they are:
1 Creativity and Innovation
2 Communication and Collaboration
3 Research and Information Fluency
4 Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making
5 Digital Citizenship
6 Technology Operations and Concepts
You can see them all in more
detail here: http://www.iste.org/standards/nets-for-students/nets-student-standards-2007
Let’s start at the top. I have
met more than my share of students who have creativity, but do not know how to
get it out. For example last year I had a student who was very particular about
how he expressed himself creatively. He was very critical of anything that he
made by hand. This student was then able to use a program, Scratch, to program
his own game. It was great to see him come into his own with his creativity. In
this way he was able to find something that he felt deeply about doing and he
was able to apply his knowledge in a way that wouldn't have been possible
otherwise. Scratch helped him tap into his creativity to generate a new idea.
There are some other technology
tools that are useful to all the students. Websites like www.edmodo.com are very helpful in
communication. I not only use this in my classroom to communicate with my
students, but they use it to communicate, collaborate and publish with each other. They have been able
to submit work on the site and then view other classes projects and share the
learning at home. Our schools Odyssey of the Mind team used it to develop ideas in between meetings and our Gifted
program uses it to have an out of school book club across the district to dig
into books that are above grade level. In terms of the three Rs, this is a big
win for relationships. It helps with my teacher student relationship, as well
as their learner to learner relationships.
Google Docs takes the cake
when it comes to organizing information for a number of participants at the
same time. This is something that I have not tried with my students, but more
that I have experienced through social organizations and through the grad class
I am taking at Wilkes currently. I need to look into what road blocks there are
for using this with students who do not have emails and are under 13.
My students are aware that
they can use Google to search for information. What they do not know at this
point is how to separate good information from bad. They also do know to
successfully search for what they are looking for, or to get results that are
not over their heads. Being able to use
a Moodle, wiki or diigo site to help them only look at resources that are trust
worthy and age appropriate. By giving them some guidelines, it can help them
research and be effective without getting lost in the wide open internet. 10 year olds know that most people use
internet sources in the real world. Giving them the opportunities to use these
sources allows them to feel relevant and look at information from multiple sources.
Digital Citizenship brings me
back to edmodo. It is good to have tool to teach the students in a more controlled
environment how they should communicate online. They are able to post to each other
and learn with each other in a responsible way.
Which brings me to the end of
my list- Technology Operations and
Concepts. I am very excited about an activity that I just introduced to my
students. I have an edited copy of Christopher Columbus’s Journal that I am
having the students bring to life. They each have a part of the story and they
get to work with it as they choose. I have students who are making short plays.
I have others that are making power points and still others that making a movie
with movie maker. It is great to see them work together and teach their
partners about what they can do with technology.
All of this together
highlights how technology can help me move towards the 3 Rs of Rigor, Relevance,
and Relationships. Now I just need continue to grow my application knowledge to
find more ways to use technology in the classroom.
Resources
