New Tech Standards and Requirements

This week we were introduced to educational technology standards. As it turns out, Oregon has its own set of standards, aptly called the Oregon Educational Technology Standards, or OETS. The OETS have six primary categories:

1. Creativity and Innovation

2. Communication and Collaboration

3. Research and Information Fluency

4. Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making

5. Digital Citizenship

6. Technology Operations and Concepts

I will spend the rest of this post discussing categories 2, 3, and 4.

Communication and Collaboration

There are a variety of ways to incorporate technology in the high school English classroom to foster communication and collaboration. One specific activity could be a group project where students presented the project by making a short YouTube video which would then be shared with the class. Students could also use Google Docs to collaborate on a group assignment. A teacher could pair up students to edit and provide feedback to one another on a draft of an essay, and then have the students use Google Docs to share their work with one another. Another idea is a class blog--each student could be assigned one week during which he/she would be expected to contribute to the blog. Students could also perform scenes from plays and make YouTube videos; students could make Yodio postings about readings and have to respond to one another; and students could record book reports as YouTube videos. These last three ideas would provide students the opportunity to practice their communication and revise it before having to turn it in; they might also help those students who are more shy or dislike public speaking find their voice and build their confidence for future public speaking.

Research and Information Fluency

This category also seems to be quite relevant to the high school English classroom. I like the idea of having students subscribe to blogs (literary blogs, blogs about grammar, anything they want that relates to the class) and use Google Reader to filter them. I could also have students do research projects on authors and use the internet to do their research. I also like the idea of having students search the internet for scholarly writing/critiques on a text we are reading in our class (e.g. To Kill a Mockingbird) and write a short paper about what they learned from the critique as well as what they agree and disagree with in the writing they found. Especially with a text with such historical significance as To Kill a Mockingbird, I could have students research context and history and prepare a power point presentation for the class regarding how context and history influenced the text. Teachers could also post assignments to a course website to help with information fluency.

Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making

Many of the ideas mentioned above relate to Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making. In all honesty, I think all six of these categories are interrelated, and any activity will probably address skills relevant to every category. For example, using the internet to conduct research about the context and history around To Kill a Mockingbird and then analyzing how the text was influenced certainly involves critical thinking.

Another idea: if I were teaching a course on Gothic literature/Romanticism, I could post link to clips from films (such as Rebecca or something more contemporary like Silence of the Lambs) and ask my students to look for Gothic themes present in the films and then discuss them (or post them to a course website).

If I were teaching a course on the Odyssey or the Iliad, I think it would be really important to give students a sense of the Greek landscape. The internet provides a great opportunity to find photos of the landscape and the scale of the Greek countryside. After sharing photos, I could have students write about how they think the landscape affected the epics (especially the Odyssey) and the use of the natural world as monsters and such (such as Scylla and Charybdis...).

Challenges We Could Face When Trying to Implement These Ideas

The biggest challenge we face when it comes to using technology in the classroom is accessibility. To me, this means a lot of things. Students might not have computers at home. There might be filters in place on school computers (e.g. no facebook access, no YouTube access) that would be a huge obstacle if I required my students to create and post YouTube videos and they did not have a computer at home. There might not be enough computers or enough time to use them at school. Budget cuts and other financial issues make it difficult for every student to have a computer at their beck and call at school. Too bad money doesn't grow on trees...

Possible solutions to these problems:
By employing group activities, it is possible I might be able to make sure each group has at least one person with a home computer. Then students could create their YouTube presentations, and email them to me. I could then put them in my DropBox to make sure I could still access the presentations at school. I could also set aside class time to use school computers and also encourage students to use computers at the Public Libraries. Students would probably be fairly unfamiliar with Google Docs, Google Reader, and possibly even how to post on YouTube. I could create Screenr presentations to show them how to use these tools.

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