Where to?

 

During the past week I have really mulled over how to keep my students engaged.  Every morning I have students walk into the cafeteria and tell me about all of the games they own for their Wii, basketball games on TV, and the videos the songs they listen to after school. This may date me, but I never reflected on how technology impacts so many aspects of their lives.  I am from the tech generation, though I never owned a cell phone until high school and only briefly got into Mario Kart.

Tonight I viewed a webinar on just how much technology impacts the lives of our students. The presenter began by introducing her son, who as a one-year-old was already engaging with technology on a day-to-day basis. She then explained that, on average, a teacher is tasked with teaching 255 standards and 3,968 benchmarks. If we spend 30 minutes per benchmark we would need an additional 9 years of schooling to cover every topic. The webinar then explained how we can marry technology and benchmarks not only to plan lessons and units by backwards design, but to engage students on a deep, challenging level. Discovery Education hosts a tool that links teachers to technology resources based on their state standards.

Once you have standards linked to resources you really need to consider how technology can be used in every part of your lesson to engage and captivate your students beyond a surface-level interest. My presenter used the acronym WHERE TO to describe how technology can be integrated into curriculum:

 W: What misconceptions might exist? 

 Technology can help us introduce a topic by offering a gauge of where our students stand, especially with English language learners. By middle school students are at various stages of development and have had a variety of past experiences. This helps them assess where their background knowledge places them without a fear of being wrong.

Ex: “Half the story” – Zoom in on a small detail of a photograph and have your students use prediction skills to guess what they think the whole picture might show. This engages students at all levels of the development spectrum, which, as we discussed, is often typical in middle school.

 H: Hold Attention 

This is probably the most intuitive piece. I won’t spend much time on it because seeing where technology really hooks students is fairly easy.

 E: Experiential learning 

Middle School students are usually funneled from a few elementary schools and can often have very different primary education experience. Experiential learning through technology, especially in urban classrooms, can help expose students to science experiences and cultures they may otherwise not be able to experience. Interactive learning tools also help teachers adjust to ever-evolving content and current events.

 R: Rethinking, Revising, Refining learning 

 Checking for understanding can be a challenging aspect of this work. By middle school students have likely grown tired of the “Think, Pair, Share” dialogues and classroom sharing. Technology can help us assess whether learning is successful by providing checks for understanding for a diverse, and sometimes angsty, group like middle school.

 Ex: Silent Video – Play a silent video to students. Talk about relevant vocabulary and have them make predictions. Discuss strategies used to make predictions and other inferences. Play back video with sound and have students summarize or change a story ending by using the literary strategy you discussed.

 E: Evaluate and reflect 

 I felt this point was a bit redundant. See above point for evaluating and reflecting.

 T: Tailor content to levels and interests of kids 

This may perhaps be the most applicable use of technology. Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory states that students learn in a variety of ways, especially during adolescents. Technology provides us access to visual, auditory, and other tools to help various learners engage at the level of rigor they are able to engage with.

O: Organize and sequence the learning 

Perhaps the most important application of technology to us. Assignment builders can help organize, sequence, and group lessons as they relate to similar topics and foundational skills. Organization tools can also help students learn how to organize and convey their thoughts.

Ex: “Glogster” – a website that allows students (and teachers) to create virtual presentation posters complete with videos and sound.

 At the end of the day, what I’m trying to say with this blog post is that technology can help us conquer some of the diversity and subsequent difficulty with middle school learning. Technology can be incorporated into every aspect of our lesson and can help our students engage with content at a level of rigor that we may not be able to provide through our own differentiation.