Reflecting on Technological Integration and 21st Century Literacy Skills

One of the most important goals of education has always been to promote literacy in our students. In the past, this consisted of being able to read, write, and understand written text. Today, however, literacy is much more complicated then being able to read and write and includes technological skills that are essential to compete and succeed in today's global economy.

I was first specifically introduced to this concept when I read the book "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman. In this book, Friedman focuses on the impact that technology has had on today's world and spends a considerable amount of time is spent detailing the way our educational system needs to reflect these changes. I read this book about two years ago and it is one of the reasons that I chose this program for my Master's Degree. I realized quickly that the integration of technology into the classroom was becoming increasingly relevant and important for today's students and I wanted to take steps to ensure I was fully capable of succeeding in doing this.

One aspect of this course that impacted me considerably was the material regarding the importance of teaching our students the need and importance of referencing sources and giving credit to those that are deserving of it. After the section of this course that focused on this topic I realized that most of the students I interact with daily do not take referencing very seriously. They may do it with minimal effort but they don't truly appreciate the necessity for the practice. This is definitely one thing that I want to focus on in my classroom. I want to get my students to appreciate the practice, understand its' importance, and make it become second nature to give credit where it is due. This is one of the most important characteristics of 21st century literacy and I believe it is often overlooked in secondary education.

The next practice that was highlighted in this course is the importance of evaluating the legitimacy of websites and information located on the internet. Students typically assume that any information they find on the internet is accurate and reliable and this is definitely untrue. One practice that I will always use in my classroom is to search for and show my students highly inaccurate websites on the internet to demonstrate that a lot of information you can find on the internet is in fact false and inaccurate. Getting students to understand that websites designed to mislead you exist is the first step in getting them to understand the importance of evaluating the legitimacy of websites on the internet.

Personally, my one goal as a social studies teacher is to incorporate the strategies and tools I learned of in this course into my classroom seamlessly. Although I believe that 21st century literacy skills go hand-in-hand with social studies, I want to ensure that I make a dedicated effort to incorporate these types of tools into my course material. Therefore, I want to ensure that at least 1 time a grading period, an assignment is conducted in my class that uses 21st century learning skills to complete an assignment. I do not want to limit myself to just 4 of these types of assignments but I do want to place a minimum at 4 21st Century Learning Skill assignments per school year to ensure that I am incorporating these ideas and strategies into my classroom.

Reflection

About 8 weeks ago I created a personal theory of learning that centered around project-based learning environment combined with a social learning environment where students create concrete objects to assess their learning and work together regularly to do so. Throughout the last 8 weeks, I have been exposed to concepts, strategies, and tools that reinforce my beliefs in this type of learning environment and am excited to incorporate them into my classroom someday.

One aspect that I may choose to modify within my personal theory of learning relates to my use of social learning. When I discussed the use of social learning, I did so assuming that the social learning would take place among the students in my class or possibly also with students from other classes. However, with one of the technological tools I have been exposed to, (which I will discuss later) I realized that I could extend this even further and work with students from other cities, regions, and even countries.

Some of the things I have learned over the course of 8 weeks will have an immediate impact on my instructional practices in the classroom. One of these is the use of a program such as Inspiration that allows students to create digital graphic organizers. By doing this, students will be able to incorporate this technological into their learning so they are able to organize their thoughts and utilize the program to create artifacts that will be used to assess their learning. A second short-term goal that I have in regards to integrating technology is to incorporate a blog in my classroom. Most students have probably had experiences with blogs or things like them so I believe I could make this transition relatively seamlessly. My experiences using a blog over the past eight weeks have reinforced my beliefs that they can be used successfully in a high school classroom. I feel that this will be a great tool for students to express their thoughts and opinions based on the content that we are learning.


In addition to these immediate impacts in my classroom, there are also some long-term goals I have integrating technology. One long-term goal that I have in regards to technology in my classroom involves VoiceThread, which is a tool that I feel could be very effective in the classroom. My actual goal is to eventually collaborate with students from another state or even another country using this program. I think that would be a great tool for a social studies classroom to be able to look at a historical event and learn the perspectives of students from another country. This goal is long-term for me because I want to ensure that I am proficient using the technology before I try to integrate it in my classroom on such a large scale. Once I feel very comfortable using VoiceThread, I plan on incorporating it within my classroom. A second long-term goal of mine is to continue learning and becoming comfortable with new technologies as they are procured. I think this is essential to being an educator in today's world and I want to make sure that I take the steps necessary to ensure that I do. Therefore, I will make a commitment to a lifelong learning of technological tools that I can integrate in the classroom to ensure that my students will always be prepared for the world in which they will eventually work in and be able to succeed using these tools.

My VoiceThread Creation

Copy and paste the link provided below into your web address bar to view my VoiceThread.

http://voicethread.com/share/1198220/

Social Learning Thoery In Practice

During my student teaching, one aspect of social learning that I liked to use was the jigsaw activity. Instead of trying to explain the activity to you in my own words, I am going to make reference of a great website I was introduced to this week in our text that does a great job summarizing the activity in addition to providing a great resource for any teacher (experienced or unexperienced) wanting to utilize this strategy.

1. Divide students into 5- or 6-person jigsaw groups. The groups should be diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity, race, and ability.

2. Appoint one student from each group as the leader. Initially, this person should be the most mature student in the group.

3. Divide the day's lesson into 5-6 segments. For example, if you want history students to learn about Eleanor Roosevelt, you might divide a short biography of her into stand-alone segments on: (1) Her childhood, (2) Her family life with Franklin and their children, (3) Her life after Franklin contracted polio, (4) Her work in the White House as First Lady, and (5) Her life and work after Franklin's death.

4. Assign each student to learn one segment, making sure students have direct access only to their own segment.

5. Give students time to read over their segment at least twice and become familiar with it. There is no need for them to memorize it.

6. Form temporary "expert groups" by having one student from each jigsaw group join other students assigned to the same segment. Give students in these expert groups time to discuss the main points of their segment and to rehearse the presentations they will make to their jigsaw group.

7. Bring the students back into their jigsaw groups.

8. Ask each student to present her or his segment to the group. Encourage others in the group to ask questions for clarification.

9. Float from group to group, observing the process. If any group is having trouble (e.g., a member is dominating or disruptive), make an appropriate intervention. Eventually, it's best for the group leader to handle this task. Leaders can be trained by whispering an instruction on how to intervene, until the leader gets the hang of it.

10. At the end of the session, give a quiz on the material so that students quickly come to realize that these sessions are not just fun and games but really count.
From: http://www.jigsaw.org/steps.htm

Trust me, that was a lot more coherent then my explanation would have been. Anyways, if you have not used this technique before, it is a great way to give your students new information while at the same time giving them a new activity that breaks up a class period into a few different sections. If executed properly, I think this activity exemplifies my opinions of the benefits of social learning in the classroom.

First of all, as the creator of the groups, you have the ability to arrange the groupings in a way that places students of various abilities and strengths/weaknesses together in a way that can hopefully benefit everyone involved.If you have a student that struggles with something, they can watch another student in their group succeed at that specific task to gain insight into how they can become better and hopefully master the particular skill. In addition to this, it allows students to put information into their own words which might benefit their peers that end up learning the information from them. Regardless of whether or not you relate well to your students, sometimes the way we teacher phrase particular items or explain certain topics simply is difficult for our students to understand. Some students may have a better time understanding information if it is facilitated to them by one of their own peers. The last thing I will mention (although there are plenty of other things) is the real world value this activity includes. These students are put into a group of peers (coworkers) who then have to interpret information so they can pass it on to another group of peers (coworkers) who are learning (working on) something else. It is my opinion that many of our students would benefit from this type of routine not only in their future careers, but also in college, if that is the path they are taking.

Overall, I believe that social learning has a valuable place within our classroom to help students learn together and to prepare our students for their futures. That being said, I do not believe that social learning should be the sole strategy used in the classroom because I believe it can be misused or manipulated by students fairly easily. Therefore, it is my belief that social learning techniques and strategies should be used on occasion within the classroom in addition to a variety of other teaching strategies.

Constructivism in Practice

As many of us know, the ideas of constructivism focus around students essentially creating their own learning experience while the teacher serves as a facilitator of information and ideas instead of the only source. In addition, constructionism additionally suggests that students learn best when an actual product is created during the learning process and the student actually creates something with the information that they are learning. Both of these concepts are regularly seen within the classroom on a regular basis in most schools across the country. However, I believe that with the increased integration of technology into schools, we will see even more project based learning and constructionism in the classroom that focuses around students creating an actual artifact to demonstrate they have obtained the necessary content material.

The book I have been using recently, "Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works" (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, & Malensoki, 2007), dives further into this subject and suggests numerous technological tools and strategies that can incorporate this particular learning theory and apply it to the actual classroom. The ones that drew particular interest from me were the web resources that were discussed, particularly one titled, "Muzzy Lane's Making History: The Calm and the Storm, which can be found at www.making-history.com. As a social studies teacher, I was immediately interested by this particular learning tool because it focused on social studies content. In addition, after reading about the tool, I began to think that this could have some real impact in my classroom when I teach about World War II.

To briefly summarize the web resources, students are placed in the position of a leader of a particular country near the onset of World War II. They then begin making various decisions that particular leader would have had to make and then see if their decisions changed the outcome of that particular moment in history; thus constructing their own learning. I say this because they have the ability to see what types of decisions could have been made (instead of the ones that were) and see how these different decisions could have changed the outcome of this time period in history.

In addition to this tool, the other web resources that were discussed had much of the same relationship with constructivism in that they allowed students to take control of a situation and then see what kind of outcome their decisions produced. These ranged from web resources involving weather to modifying a catapult to ensure a direct hit on a building. Not only do these constructivist strategies allow students to see how the information they are learning can actually be applied, they also serve as a fun way to learn and an approach that will likely be enjoyed by the students which is always a good thing.

Cognitive Learning Theory in the Classroom with the Use of Technology

Just as last week, today's post will be utilizing ideas gained through the use of the textbook, "Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works" (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, & Malenoski, 2007). As stated in the title, this weeks entry will focus on various instructional strategies and their relationship with cognitive learning theory. Refreshing my memory on cognitive learning theory and some of the tools that go along with it reopened by eyes to the effectiveness of many of the strategies associated with the theory and also the ideas that are associated with the theory, which I will be sharing with you today.

One of the most influential concepts that comes from cognitive learning theory, in my opinion, is the concept of dual coding of information. This idea essentially states that the ability to remember things can be positively impacted if you can find a way to remember it in two ways, or dually. The most practical way for me to achieve this as a social studies teacher is to consistently provide useful images to go along with ideas, people, events, or places that I am covering with my students. In addition, if I can use a concept map at the same time, I can not only take advantage of dually coding the information, I can also take steps to create a network of information relating to a single topic, thus increasing my students ability to remember whatever it is we are discussing. When it comes to organizing information, I feel that concept maps give you a great ability to succeed, especially when it is a digital concept map that is capable of including images along with text. That way, students can not only see the web of information but also the images that exemplify and identify the ideas, events, or people we are discussing.

Another useful tool in the classroom that exemplifies cognitive learning theory is the use of the virtual field trip. If used effectively, a virtual field trip can create an actual experience that students will be able to look back on to remember information. The creation of an actual experience can be the most effective way of retaining information and if a virtual field trip is executed properly, it can do just that. In my opinion, the best virtual field trips are those that create a sense that you are actually there. Many virtual field trips that are available are simply a slide show that fuses information and pictures together and calls it a virtual field trip. I disagree. I think that an effective virtual field trip incorporates more then just pictures and text. They should include moving video taken from the point of view of actually being at the site. This way, an actual experience is created in the students brain so they can recall the information that is learned from the virtual field trip.

I plan on suggesting many of my colleagues to review the information presented in the cognitive learning theory and also strategies that make use of ideas taken from the theory. I feel that a lot can be gained by doing so and it can reignite the desire to make a concerted effort to use these strategies in the classroom to ensure that students are given the best opportunity to retain the information that is presented to them on a daily basis.

Behaviorism and Technology

For this post, I am going to be referencing the book "Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works", written by Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, and Malenoski (2007). In particular, I am going to be discussing the correlation between behaviorism and the learning theories of reinforcing effort and homework and practice.

The basic idea of reinforcing effort is that by creating a project that forces students to keep track of how their effort impacts their success in the classroom throughout a unit. Students create some type of chart or spreadsheet to help monitor their scores on assessments along with their effort in specific areas relating to that assessment or lesson. In a perfect world, students would see that when they put forth increased effort, they gain better results. This not only shows students that effort in a subject can breed results, but it also boosts student self-confidence because they see that they are truly capable of succeeding in the classroom. In essence, this is classic behavioralism at work because it centers around the idea that students will see that effort increases their scores and this realization should modify their behavior and persuade them to continue putting forth effort.

The basic idea of homework and practice is that students can have high success rates learning material if they complete homework on the subject and actually practice using the material numerous times. Parts of this strategy reflect behavioralism better than others, but one area that reflects behavioralism very well is that of using web resources for students to practice their content. One web resource that I am familiar with is called Study Island. Essentially, students have the ability to complete quizzes or assignments on Study Island and when they answer a question correctly, they are allowed an "attempt" at the game that correlates with the quiz. )For example, the content could be a 9th grade social studies standard quiz and the game that could be played is a variation of bowling) Students eventually can become conditioned to put forth enough effort to submit correct answers so that they can play the game that is presented on Study Island. It is a simple example of modifying behavior by providing a reward "at the end of the tunnel".