Addressing Ed Tech Standards in the Classroom
By Sean on Thursday, March 3, 2011 - Related Tags:- classroomobservations, news, research, standards
For the past 2 years, I've been working with a school district that has adopted a 1-to-1 mobile laptop program. Each child in grades 4 - 12 uses a personal laptop computer with grades 6 - 12 students taking their laptop home each night. I have also been able to conduct hundreds of classroom observations during this span. The first year we observed, we focused largley on some very basic questions like the following:
- What technology is being used?
- Who is using the technology (i.e., teacher? student?)?
- How often is technology being used?
We were able to collect data before students had laptop computers and then after students had the laptops. Not surprisingly, technology use by students skyrocketed after the laptop initiative began. Our observations during this second year have focused much more on how technology is being used. We collect data every 5 minutes still looking at the questions above, but we have also added fields on our data collection insrument to note how technology is being used. Moreover, we are using relevant educational technology standards (Michigan, USA in this case -- Michigan Educational Technology Standards here) to see how these standards are being addressed in the classroom (or even if they are being addressed). We're finding that students need to be using technology to more meaningfully address the educational technology standards -- again, this is practically common sense. However, a few teachers have creatively addressed standards without using much technology. But these observations are rare and our findings are still preliminary.
I plan to provide a nice overview of current findings at the SITE Conference 2011 next week. My session is Evaluating A Ubiquitous Computing Initiative in Room 15 on Fri, Mar. 11 11:30 AM-12:30 PM. Maybe I'll see you there? Or, you can check back on this blog for snippets of the results in the future.