Project 8 What role might technology have in my future as a teacher?
Due May 4th
Essential Question: What role might technology have in my future as a teacher?
Project Description: This project will give you an opportunity to reflect on your experiences and work with technology in education, consider some essential understandings you have built, and write about some outstanding questions you may have about the place of technology in your teaching, your student’s lives, and the schools in your future. As a way to prompt your thinking and reflection, I’d like you to watch the TED Talk at the end of this post where “Sugata Mitra makes his bold TED Prize wish: Help me design the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can explore and learn from each other — using resources and mentoring from the cloud. Hear his inspiring vision for Self Organized Learning Environments.”
My goal for you is to consider some of the big ideas related to learning and technology and the specific ways they impact the content area and grade level you teach. As a teacher of the future, you will be in a place to make decisions and provide leadership for how technology integration happens in your school. As you’ve experienced and seen, currently technology integration is often a retrofit for the physical space of a school and the mental space for educators. But for our students who are growing up in a very different world, it’s built into how they are learning to learn. An important part of our role as educators is determining how this fits into teaching and learning. Your work as a teacher leader of the future will continue to involve these considerations, and you will all have different ways of thinking about it and experiencing it. Some of you may see a more limited role for technology in your student’s learning, while others may choose a more immersive experience. Regardless, your decisions will be informed by how we learn and the systems you work in. You will find your place, and it will continue to evolve. I encourage you to stay connected to your professional learning networks and colleagues who are working to build their own understandings. We’re all trying to figure it in progress, and we always will be. As your conversations and considerations for how to teach evolve, some of you may have the chance to work in technology immersion schools that were designed with our current understandings of technology in mind. In the future, some of you will be a part of development teams that will design new physical and virtual schools and learning spaces. I hope you can continue to stay connected to this important work, listen to your students, and add your voice to the conversation. As a reminder, these are the current International Society for Technology in Education Standards for Students that will help guide you on this journey.
1. Empowered Learner: Students leverage technology to take an active role in choosing, achieving and demonstrating competency in their learning goals, informed by the learning sciences.
2. Digital Citizen: Students recognize the rights, responsibilities and opportunities of living, learning and working in an interconnected digital world, and they act and model in ways that are safe, legal and ethical.
3. Knowledge Constructor: Students critically curate a variety of resources using digital tools to construct knowledge, produce creative artifacts and make meaningful learning experiences for themselves and others.
4. Innovative Designer: Students use a variety of technologies within a design process to identify and solve problems by creating new, useful or imaginative solutions.
5. Computational Thinker: Students develop and employ strategies for understanding and solving problems in ways that leverage the power of technological methods to develop and test solutions.
6. Creative Communicator: Students communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats and digital media appropriate to their goals.
7. Global Collaborator: Students use digital tools to broaden their perspectives and enrich their learning by collaborating with others and working effectively in teams locally and globally.
Submission: Here is a link to a Google Doc where you can write your reflection in the cell with your name in it.
Criteria:
- Your reflection is a minimum of 600 words and is your answer to the Essential Question: What role might technology have in my future as a teacher?
- A part of your reflection is connected to or inspired by the ideas in Sugata Mitra’s talk.
- Your reflection includes a question or a wondering about the role of technology in your teaching future.