What About Openness!

What about Openness!

We want our students to be the best, right? How do we do that and not make technology a key component in our day-to-day instruction! According to the Partnership for 21st  Century Skills P21 Framework (2009),  education today is more than Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. To adequately prepare our students for the 21^st Century, we have to integrate creativity, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking into our core content areas.

Try Animoto for integrating creativity into a simple introductory activity. Here is one I created with a few pictures from my Facebook account:

Teachers and students from Kindergarten to high school can take advantage of this tool to support and improve learning. These quick little videos can be used to introduce, review, and wrap-up units in any subject area. Some educators have used Animoto to create videos for PSAs (Public Service Announcements), vocabulary building activities, history, and math presentations (almost every content area). It is simple enough to introduce to parents so that they can guide younger students in creating their own projects. Teachers and students can finally introduce themselves without using another poster board!

Technology can be SCARY! But it can be FUN! Just give it a try. How do you Animoto?

Reference: (2009). Framework for 21^st Century Learning. Retrieved  from

http://www.p21.org/overview

Where's the Support?

Technology is changing constantly and that has been one of the reasons why I have found it difficult to integrate. Let's not forget the broken and missing-in-action technology! Once I get going, the computers crash or the bulb on my interactive whiteboard blows and I am back to square one! I have had my share of challenges as many of us do, but now more than ever, I believe that integrating technology is not an option, but necessary. We need to prepare our students for careers yet to be seen and they need to be able to compete globally.

Educators are resourceful, so besides infrastructure, we need support. We may or may not have the support of our colleagues within our school building, but there are educators around the world who are integrating technology in their day-to-day instruction and their students are engaged and excelling! How do we connect with these educators? An online PLN may be your answer!

A PLN is a Personal Learning Network. It is a group of online colleagues who share their methods, strategies, and resources. It expands your network beyond the school walls and provides on-going support and access to a wealth of resources, day and night. I connect with my PLN via RSS feeds.

Rich Site Summary

I admit that I wondered what was the purpose of this symbol and found out, in my online graduate course. A RSS feed symbol can be found on many websites and if you select the icon, you can receive updates automatically through a RSS reader. My RSS subscriptions help me stay updated on my favorite sites' postings without having to manually visit every site. I subscribe to Edutopia, Powerful Learning Practice, and the Educator's PLN and they form my PLN. I check my daily feeds through Google Reader and they are full of teaching strategies that support technology in the classroom. This short video explains how teachers can use PLNs to their advantage.

Blogger John Spencer lists reasons and descriptions about why teachers fail to use technology in their classrooms. Can you find your reason here? I did! For me, it has been Lack of Leadership and Lack of Technology. Like many other teachers, I am adding TIME!!!

1. Fear
2. Low Self-Efficacy
3. Testing
4. Consumerism
5. Lack of Leadership
6. Inconsistent Paradigms
7. Personal Experience
8. Humility
9. It's Optional
10. Lack of Technology
11. Lack of Research 

Are you a 21st Century Educator?

Are you challenged with integrating technology in your day-to-day instruction? Consider this:

Transitioning from traditional methods of teaching to more innovative, technology-centered instruction can be challenging for many of us digital immigrants! And, technology is not always reliable! Butler and Sellbom (2002) studied the reasons why educators are reluctant to integrate technology tools into their daily instruction. Reliability was the top reason. This is an issue that administrators and decision makers should address, but in the meantime, I don't believe that we should hold our students back. In 2001, Marc Prensky (p.6) stated "Educators know that something is wrong, because they are not reaching their Digital Native students as well as we reached students in the past."

Speak Up is an organization that publishes information about how students use technology and how parents, educators, and community leaders can best harness its power. This organization has surveyed students, educators, parents, administrators since 2003. Their 2009 report indicated that nearly 90% of middle- and high school students surveyed used some type of social media to interact with friends outside of school (Smith & Evans, 2010)!

Our students are not the students we were and we can no longer instruct the way we were taught. Yesterday's tools have been enhanced with Web 2.0 technology and we can use those tools to  maximize instruction and learning. I believe that we can harness the power of today's technology and impact student learning with support, openness, and commitment. Let's take this journey together! Are you convinced?

References:
Butler, D.L. & Sellbom, M. (2002). Barriers to adopting technology. Educause Quarterly, 22-28.

Prensky, M. Digital natives, digital immigrants part 2: Do they really think differently? On the Horizon, 9(6), 2-6.

Smith, L., & Evans, J. (2010). Speak Up: Students embrace digital resources for learning. Knowledge Quest, 39(2), 20-27.