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.

Digital Storytelling in Education

I chose to make a digital story that I would create as a teacher to help students understand a new concept. Using a topic I had just written about in my SME 301 (Science for Elementary Schools) class, I made my digital story about how light is needed to see color and how different colors reflect and absorb different wavelengths of light. The information presented in this video was based on a couple of the GLCEs for physical science in 3rd grade, in the categories of energy and properties of matter. Since color and light are visual properties of things we see around us, making a video definitely seems like a good tool for presenting it. VoiceThread worked out very well for me in creating the story. I was able to upload images very easily and I had no trouble figuring out the voice recorded comments. I ran into a little trouble trying to use the doodler and talk at the same time. I tended to forget what I wanted to say next (or lose my place reading off the script I created) while I was concentrating on drawing a line in the correct place on the image. The other problem I had was forgetting to switch back and forth between my two identities between pages. I would be using one identity as the last comment on one page and then I would forget to switch back when I started the first comment on the next page. It wasn't a big deal, I just had to redo a couple comments to get the identities correct with the flow of my story. I tried to be a little lighthearted with my story, creating a conversation of sorts between myself and my dog (the other identity). I'm hoping that 3rd grade students would enjoy that kind of thing.

I can see digital storytelling being a useful tool in pretty much every subject area. My story was an example of how it could be used in science, as a way to connect verbal information with a specific visual idea, which I feel is especially helpful in science. Digital stories could be used to same way to present information in social studies, such as displaying a location on a map followed by a picture of people who live in that location or important monuments. Multiple voices could be used to tell stories from history to enhance understanding of certain events. In language arts, either the teacher or students could create videos to serve as book reviews, biography reports, or to orally present poetry. I can also see uses for digital storytelling in math to present calculations or diagrams to students in ways that they can watch and listen to many times when they don't understand something. The doodler function would be useful for pointing out a specific part of a math problem, or a point of interest on a graph or geometric diagram. Videos like this could also work for presenting students' artwork or writing for themselves or parents to view or listen to. The format of a video of images with voice recordings will probably also capture students' interest much better than more traditional methods of presentation. I can see a lot of potential for digital storytelling when I am a teacher. I'm a little uncomfortable with recording my own voice and I tend to be picky about how my recordings sound, but I could probably get over that eventually. Other than that, I can definitely see digital storytelling being a useful tool.