Teachers design, develop, and evaluate authentic learning experiences and assessment incorporating contemporary tools and resources to maximize content learning in context and to develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes identified in the NETS•S. Teachers:
Design or adapt relevant learning experiences that incorporate digital tools and resources to promote student learning and creativity.
Develop technology-enriched learning environments that enable all students to pursue their individual curiosities and become active participants in setting their own educational goals, managing their own learning, and assessing their own progress.
Customize and personalize learning activities to address students’ diverse learning styles, working strategies, and abilities using digital tools and resources.
Provide students with multiple and varied formative and summative assessments aligned with content and technology standards and use resulting data to inform learning and teaching.
Reflection
Achieving Standard 2 of the ISTE NETS for teachers required quite a lot of planning and thought. I personally believe that whatever I am planning in my lessons should be practical and applicable to my classroom because I believe that it would be more relevant. Although some classrooms cannot accommodate the wide range of resources that can possibly be used to integrate technology into a lesson, while planning for this series of lessons, I attempted to make the lessons creative and interesting utilizing the kinds of technology that are available to me or to students. Thus I chose to stick to the use of the computer, laptop, MP3 Player, camera, camcorder, and access to the worldwide web and its related technologies (such as e-mail) as the main forms of digital technology and tools in the lessons. I also deliberately wanted to include in my lessons some tools that were not web-based because for me, as with many teachers, that is the reality at the moment hence the reason why I also included Microsoft Word, Excel, Power Point and the Paint programmes in the lesson as they are installed on most computers.
With these technologies, students participating in my 7-lesson unit of study would have had the opportunity to record videos, publish their work and share ideas both off- and online as intra- class projects. This would have exposed them to many different kinds of learning spaces on the web as they sought for information, discussed opinions and offering feedback on each other work, collaborated and created products both online and otherwise.
At times students are given specific things to look for or to do while at others they were free to choose the depth of what was learnt, how to demonstrate their learning and, in some cases, to select the technology that they preferred to use to accomplish the same task (recording videos using camcorders, digital cameras, cellular phones, etc). This was also done to show both the students and the teacher that they had different options that they could use to accomplish the various tasks.
Links to valuable teaching and learning resources:-
http://www.pearsonschoolsandfecolleges.co.uk/Primary/Earlyyears/Earlyyears.aspx?whatsnew=true
http://fantaztic.ca/
http://www.keypress.com/x5235.xml
http://www.usdla.org/html/journal/MAR02_Issue/article01.html
Reflection
Achieving Standard 2 of the ISTE NETS for teachers required quite a lot of planning and thought. I personally believe that whatever I am planning in my lessons should be practical and applicable to my classroom because I believe that it would be more relevant. Although some classrooms cannot accommodate the wide range of resources that can possibly be used to integrate technology into a lesson, while planning for this series of lessons, I attempted to make the lessons creative and interesting utilizing the kinds of technology that are available to me or to students. Thus I chose to stick to the use of the computer, laptop, MP3 Player, camera, camcorder, and access to the worldwide web and its related technologies (such as e-mail) as the main forms of digital technology and tools in the lessons. I also deliberately wanted to include in my lessons some tools that were not web-based because for me, as with many teachers, that is the reality at the moment hence the reason why I also included Microsoft Word, Excel, Power Point and the Paint programmes in the lesson as they are installed on most computers.
With these technologies, students participating in my 7-lesson unit of study would have had the opportunity to record videos, publish their work and share ideas both off- and online as intra- class projects. This would have exposed them to many different kinds of learning spaces on the web as they sought for information, discussed opinions and offering feedback on each other work, collaborated and created products both online and otherwise.
At times students are given specific things to look for or to do while at others they were free to choose the depth of what was learnt, how to demonstrate their learning and, in some cases, to select the technology that they preferred to use to accomplish the same task (recording videos using camcorders, digital cameras, cellular phones, etc). This was also done to show both the students and the teacher that they had different options that they could use to accomplish the various tasks.
Links to valuable teaching and learning resources:-
http://www.pearsonschoolsandfecolleges.co.uk/Primary/Earlyyears/Earlyyears.aspx?whatsnew=true
http://fantaztic.ca/
http://www.keypress.com/x5235.xml
http://www.usdla.org/html/journal/MAR02_Issue/article01.html
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