Resolving for Technology Integration
What were your New Year’s resolutions? Did you make any for your professional career? Maybe some for your students? With a new semester starting, this is a good time to start something new. Finding new lesson structure, activities, or assessment types. With all this new resolving, integrating more technology into your classroom is a natural occurrence. George Couros writes in The Innovator’s Mindset that innovation does not necessarily mean using technology, but that many times it helps in the process (p 20). This may seem daunting, but here are three simple to make this resolution come to fruition.
Start with your one thing
What is it that you are passionate about? If you took all of your goals for this year and summarized them into one word, what would it be? You can do one. You can do one well. Find that passion, find that word, find that spark that makes you want to do more. See if there is a website, tool, app or practice to fans that spark even more. Maybe your word is COMMUNICATE, try out Remind or Class Dojo. Maybe your one thing is to increase vocabulary instruction, then try out Quizlet, Memrise app, or Quizizz. Maybe you have a passion for gaming, try Kahoot, Flippity, or GimKit. Whatever it is, already having a passion or a goal in that direction will make it easier to start.
Find that spark that makes you want to do more.
Fail forward
One of the pieces I stress the most when training or showing new tools is that sometimes things don’t work. Just as a marker can dry out on a poster paper or the science activity didn’t go as plan, integrating technology can have the same results. Unlike those, integrating technology is something that can be backed down. If the technology was chosen based on a learning objective, the lesson is not a complete failure. The students are still able to achieve the objective if there is a plan B or a paper version that can be substituted. You will be losing some of the engagement and richness of the learning experience, but you can always come back at a later time and review with the same activity. As with anything new, taking time to reflect on the experience and decide what worked and what didn’t is just as important.
Open up the learning process
If failing scares you, think about it from the student’s perspective. What most of your students will see if you learning beside them. Just as my daughter was more willing to learn to tie her shoes when I tied them next to her, the students will appreciate you learning with them. One way can you learn with them is opening up the use of technology to them. As a technology integration should start with what the learning objective or success criteria you what to see of the student, use these to allow the students to choose the tool they would like to use. Choice boards, menu boards, BINGO charts are all ways teachers allow student voice and choice to show their learning. Giving the students the learning objective and a few expectations of the results can lead to wonderful learning experiences. Students are resilient. If you are unsure of how they will turn in an assignment or show off their learning, challenge them to figure it out. It might be through an upload to Google Classroom, an email, an uploaded explanation on YouTube, a picture taken on their phone over an illustration with an explanatory paragraph. Again an open process can lead to unimagined results.
Giving the students the learning objective and a few expectations of the results can lead to wonderful learning experiences.
Start slow, try, and then try again
I believe the adage is it takes 28 days of consistent work to make a new practice a habit. Resolving to try anything for 28 days is not that large of a task, especially if the resolution is to give your students an engaging, self-driven learning experience, where they the feel that they are being heard and they are given the opportunity to explore.
