Things have changed a lot in the last couple of weeks. My position has changed from a Digital Citizenship teacher in a middle school to a Technology Integration Specialist for the corporation so suddenly everything we have done in the last 17 weeks has been cast in a new light. The guiding questions for this blog will be looked at in a new perspective as well!
Initially, the specific information about how to utilize technology effectively in the classroom caused me to look at how content was delivered and what I could do using the tools that were available. Now in thinking about helping many teachers across grade levels and content area, the specific tools aren't as important as knowing what it is that the teacher wants to accomplish and finding ways to use appropriate levels of technology to enrich that goal. Understanding that personally was a big breakthrough for me and as I view others in educational settings I'm starting to see that will be a big area of focus across the board. We all need to think about what we are trying to accomplish first, look at the existing level of our students second, and finally find the tools to bring the first two together.
This course has also clarified and supported another of the opinions I held regarding technology. For someone that decided to be immersed in the study and utilization of technology, I really resisted the approach that more devices would solve all of our problems. Through both the resources presented and more importantly reading what others contributed I realized that the importance of technology isn't what technology you used in the classroom, but the techniques that you used. Content can be enhanced with video and audio representations, in-depth research at ones fingertips, making virtual models, and many more. Yes, there are apps that will allow students to drill skills but that is far down the list of the most important uses. I do have to say, however, that I often think how much better my college music theory experience would have been if I would have been able to have access to some of the software that played intervals and allowed us to identify them. In my day, you had to recruit a willing person to spend time in the practice room playing intervals for you on the piano while you identified them. While this kind of replacement would have been valuable, I think we are at the point where we can safely take this kind of drill program for granted and need to focus on the higher levels of integration.
As far as what I see using in the next year, I have to think that using either the SAMR or TPACK models to help teachers understand conceptually the direction they need to go will be the most important single thing. While the SAMR model is a little more general than TPACK (or some of the other models) it is simple enough and direct enough that teachers can look at it and see the framework and have a visual representation of the general framework. There will always be teachers that look for the app to do the teaching for them, and frankly the most you can do is continue to offer an alternate vision and structure and hope that something will resonate. Perhaps more than anything else these last weeks, the contributions of the class have shown me that there are so many possibilities that I hadn't thought of and that there is ALWAYS another approach that can be offered. Hopefully, if I can offer enough possibilities to resistant teachers they will reach a tipping point where they will see that integration of technology doesn't supplant their usefulness but supplements it even if it means their approach needs to change to allow for the deeper learning on the part of their students.
