9 February

The Planning reading provides useful guidelines for integrating technology into classroom activities.  I feel, for example, a pressure (pretty much entirely internal) to use tech tools in my classroom activities.  With the number of students I have, however, sometimes using those tools will drag me away from more important issues of curriculum or learning outcomes.  The reading both suggests types of projects and a framework for evaluating their efficacy.  

That said, I am really torn in my interests in the course.  On one hand I am intrigued by the ideas raised by the Connectivism reading.  What is knowledge?  What is the role of content when facts are so readily obtainable?  What implications does that have for our roles as teachers and learners.  These are huge intellectual issues to grapple with as we come to understand the role of new communication tools in our teaching.  At times I think that is what we need to really grapple with during class time since it forms the underpinnings of any new directions we take.

Fundamentally it is the ease of communication and the ease of finding information that are driving change.  The two help to generate the big questions and inform all aspects of the day to day questions.

Aaaaaa, that four hour log-in thing at housing just made me lose my last paragraphs!!!!!  I was writing about the other side that I feel we/I need to explore and that is the actual implementation of these types of learning strategies.

Anyway, to try and re-create, the practical side of it is harnessing the tools productively both for students and for me.  The reading on Planning helps to provide a useful framework for evaluating both tools and plans.  Careful planning helps one focus on the desired result, but these guidelines also help to evaluate the tools involved.  To paraphrase a previous reading (and Marshall McLuhan) the pipe is the message, so choosing the right one merits some thought and consideration.  With collaboration as a given for a desired goal, choosing the most appropriate tool is important.  At the same time, if content is important or conceptual understandings, planning appropriately to make the most effective use of time must be balanced.  

I often find that in my desire to achieve authentic assessments.  With performance tasks and video I have a great opportunity to capture students' real language acquisition progress.  I would also like to have them work with the video more and have more personal involvement in the editing and posting process.  As an archive of their progress there are obvious benefits if they are doing the archiving.  The reality, however, is that the need to be using language as much as possible overshadows that and I often prepare and upload video for this purpose.  It's a worthwhile endeavour but given that I see my students approximately 90 times per year for 40-45 minutes at a time, I often take on that step to enable more language oriented activities.

As I said, the Planning article provides helpful guidelines but I would also be interested in creating a companion to the ISTE standards that charts a progression of important skills and concepts for our students.  It could start with basic skills such as logging on (the early grades), progress to choosing appropriate collaborative tools (middle elementary?) and evaluation of content (upper elementary).  Along with skills, there would be important concepts as well ('where' is a webpage, what place do facts have, what is knowledge).  

As a document it would have to be fluid in order to accommodate changing technology adoptions (e.g. will ISB use fingerprints in future?) but it would chart a course for our expectations of students' ability to understand and use technology.  

In the end, I suppose I hope that we get time to dabble in the theoretical while we try to put all of this into play.