Tech Integration Plan

I feel that it is incredibly important to give students the opportunity to participate in activities that help them engage in their learning and especially help them build personal connections with their learning. I want students to be able to do work that is meaningful to them, that they remember and find helpful in years to come in school and I want my students to learn technology skills that they can apply to more than just a specific topic and assignment. I believe that technology is a powerful tool for helping students take ownership of their learning, exploring and presenting it in ways that are unique and engaging. The Internet also has great potential for the sharing of knowledge, giving students the opportunity to create projects that can easily be shared with friends and family members, allowing them to gain a sense of pride in their work and feel as if they are contributing to a greater knowledge base in the world. In my teaching in general I plan to always look for ways to help students find excitement and enjoyment in their learning, always keeping in mind principles of motivation. I believe that technology provides many possibilities for achieving these goals.

In my technology integration plan I will illustrate how several different technologies can be used to enhance the reading component of the 5th grade language arts curriculum. I believe that students gain enormous benefits from developing a habit of reading independently for pleasure in their day to day life. I want to promote independent reading in my classroom and give students opportunities to use technology to engage in and share their favorite books, both from independent reading and books read as a class. This will be a set of projects and assignments ongoing throughout the school year and will include technologies such as blogs, wikis, map mashups, digital storytelling, and making internet searches for needed information.

Throughout the school year students will write book reviews on the books they read independently and post them on a specific page on the class wiki. This wiki page is meant to be a place where students can share their favorite books with their classmates in an effort to promote excitement over reading and a sharing of book recommendations with others. Students will be required to write at least three book reviews of either fiction or nonfiction books during the school year and post them on the class wiki. Students will also be instructed on how to create and maintain a blog and many assignments related to reading will take the form of blog posts, including all of their book reviews, and many specific response writings to different books and stories read in class, and also personal narratives, fictional stories, and poems that students write themselves. I want my students to start selecting and placing their quality work online where they can easily access it even after the school year is over. I want them to begin to see technologies such as blogs and wikis as places for them to share their thoughts with others and add to a growing knowledge base.

Other technologies that will be incorporated into independent reading assignments will include Google Maps and digital stories. As a teacher I intend to create my own maps and digital stories to share with my students to help them enhance their understanding of literature read in class. Students will be exposed to these technologies by exploring or viewing creations made by the teacher related to books read in class. Google Maps can be used to highlight and provide more details about locations where different stories take place and digital stories can be used for multiple purposes, including explaining historical contexts of a story, giving information about an author, or creating a response to a certain aspect of the story. Later in the school year students will have the opportunity to learn how to create their own Google Maps and digital stories. For independent reading of historical fiction novels students can create maps that display the setting of the novel, information about the real life location at that period in history, and its significance to the story. Student created digital stories can be used to present information from a biography. Students would search for pictures online of the person they read about and narrate a description of this person’s life and accomplishments based on these pictures in the form of a digital story.

Along with these specific projects students will also learn valuable internet skills in the process of creating them. I want to encourage my students to search the internet for information, reviews, and opinions about their favorite books on websites and blogs. I will teach them how to evaluate a website as a source of quality information and also warn them about the dangers of incorrect information and inappropriate content that they need to be aware of when searching the web. I plan to also search for quality sources myself and provide them to my students to explore. Students will also learn how to search for images online for use in their projects and posts to the class wiki and their blogs. They will also learn how to properly give credit to these images. Some of the GLCEs for 5th grade that this plan meets are:
R.NT.05.01 Analyze how characters and communities reflect life (in positive and negative ways) in classic, multicultural, and contemporary literature recognized for quality and literary merit.
R.NT.05.02 Analyze the structure, elements, style, and purpose of narrative genre including historical fiction, tall tales, science fiction, fantasy, and mystery.
R.IT.05.03 Explain how authors use text features including timelines, graphs, charts, diagrams, tables of contents, indices, introductions, summaries, and conclusions to enhance the understanding of key and supporting ideas.
R.CM.05.01 Connect personal knowledge, experiences, and understanding of the world to themes and perspectives in text through oral and written responses.
R.CM.05.02 Retell through concise summarization grade-level narrative and informational text.
R.AT.05.01 Be enthusiastic about reading and do substantial reading and writing on their own.

This plan provides a large number of ideas in how to incorporate technology into the language arts curriculum, focusing mainly on ideas of how technology can be used to enhance students’ experiences interacting with and responding to the literature they read. The class wiki, student blogs, and book reviews would be introduced at the beginning of the year as activities that would continue throughout the school year. Searching the web for information about literature will also be introduced fairly early on as well so students can quickly begin to use this process to help them select new books to read independently throughout the school year. Teacher created map mashups and digital stories will be used frequently in both language arts and other subjects. These will first be introduced for the students to view on a projector screen, with the technology pulled up on the teacher’s computer. By the middle of the year, students will receive instruction on how to navigate these technologies and have many opportunities to explore them on their own. During the second half of the year the class will begin learning how to create map mashups and digital stories themselves. I hope that this progression from viewing to exploring to creating will build excitement and motivation for the students as they slowly gain more experience and compentency in using these technologies. Students will work in pairs in class to create these technologies before they make their own for the historical fiction and biography book reports. Through these technology activities I hope that my students will gain ideas of ways to respond to literature that they can use in future years of school and develop habits of reading independently, developing their own ideas about literature, and being willing to share those ideas with others. These technologies are tools that can help them achieve these goals.