Inquiry Question: How can teachers effectively incorporate technology into their curriculum, instructional and assessment practices?
Rationale: Students can largely benefit from using technology to learn concepts as it is engaging and allows for students to work through concepts independently. Technology also develops the skills of a 21st-century learner.
Proposal: Technology has always been something that I have shown an interest in, but have always been hesitant implementing into my lessons as my confidence is so low. With talking with my peers and other teachers, I have noticed that some teachers love to use technology or they hate it. The reason why they hate it is that they do not know how to implement the technology. For my PS III practicum, I am in a classroom that is part of an initiative within our school division called the green screen initiative. Within my classroom, I have access to 6 iPad’s, a green screen as well as all students have access to the school’s chrome books. Having access to all of this amazing technology made me question how could I implement these to enhance my lessons? With talking with the division technology specialist and my teacher mentor, we began to discuss rather than focussing on how I can use technology to enhance my classroom but also focus on how one can use technology to enhance the curriculum they are teaching, the way they teach the content through instruction and the way one can assess using technology. Throughout my practicum, I will be creating a resource guide to provide teachers with different technology techniques that they can incorporate into the curriculum, instruction, and assessment within the science curriculum that I am teaching. This teacher resource guide will be in the form of a weebly so that I can continue to add to this resource as I continue to develop more knowledge on technology. Within the resource guide, I will have research promoting the use of technology within the classrooms and showing the benefits to our students learning. I will have different techniques broken down into the three categories of curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Within these tabs, I will have different ways to incorporate technology, how to use that specific app or device and the positive effects this has on students learning specifically within science In order to show the learning that I have endured throughout this internship, I will reflect on the lesson that I used technology in. For example, I have used QR codes for a sorting activity. So, I will reflect on how the students managed the technology, how was the lesson changed and what further areas of growth I need to have in order to successfully implement technology into my classroom. Integrating technology tends to increase student engagement, digital citizenship, and leadership skills. Technology also develops creative and innovative thinking skills within our students. Technology frequently encourages students to collaborate with one another and puts the responsibility in the hands of the student as they have control of their own learning. By implementing effective technological practices within my classroom, I hope to provide my students with effective lessons and learning experiences but to also share what I have learned with other teachers so that all students have the opportunity to learn with technology effectively.