Thursday, April 10th, 2008

As an educator of educators I realize that the best way to make an impact on my students is to provide them with information, software, or hardware that they can use within a week of their latest staff development class.  Thus, a lot of what we offer at the Tuolumne County Superintendent of Schools office is basic software knowledge: Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Windows and Macintosh operating systems.  These things are almost immediately useful to teachers who lack knowledge in these areas.

But we're finally reaching saturation points, at least with regard to MS Office.  So I have been thinking about second level classroom integration of technology.  We're starting to move away from software that simply makes using the dominant paradigms easier, and we're slowly moving toward new paradigms.  The trick with getting folks to adopt new paradigms --at least with regard to the adoption of technology in the classroom-- is to point out how something new makes a teacher's job easier or reaches kids in new and exciting ways.  So the first thing to address is relevant content standards.

California Dept. of Education's (CDE) Content Standards: http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/
International Society for Technology in Education's (ISTE) National Content Standards: http://cnets.iste.org/currstands/

These days I start all my technology integration classes with an examination of the state standards.  I have teachers look up their grade level and subject.  I ask them to have a particular standard in mind for the information or skill they will learn.  This serves to focus the lesson, associates the new information with established  knowledge, and gives the teacher an immediate use for the new information or skill.

In my next installment I'll apply this to a particular subject.

Thanks for reading!  Feel free to contact me.
Daniel
dnestlerode@tuolcoe.k12.ca.us




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