50+ Tactics and Resources to Support Integrating Technology into Your Curriculum

Norman Hall G518

In an effort to catalog the various tactics/tools and resources employed in my undergraduate course, Integrating Technology into the Secondary Curriculum, I offer the following list of items we experimented with over the last sixteen weeks. Students reported that while they have not continued to use all of the applications listed below, they do continue to use many for a variety of purposes. There were many additional resources employed that I have not listed. Most of these can be found by visiting my Delicious account and searching under 4406 and/or 4406spring2010.

GMail
I always invite students to create GMail accounts on the first day of a class. GMail is the gateway drug to the entire Google suite of applications that I find myself using multiple times a day.

Google Docs
Google Docs includes spreadsheets, presentations, word processing, forms, that can be shared and posted online.

Google Sites
Google Sites was used to support student portfolios. It’s free, easy to use, and easy to edit.

Google Search
Google Search can be customized for specific specific student activities and include a filter that permits searches for Creative Commons images. We also explored the Invisible Web through the variety of search sites noted on a Makeuseof.com post.

Google Buzz
We talked about Buzz but did not spend much time with it. Like Wave, Buzz seemed like a solution looking for a problem. It did offer a wonderful collaborative potential, but did not replace our other means of working together.

iGoogle & Google Reader
Students experimented with personal start pages like iGoogle and PageFlakes, and were assigned to explore Google Reader as a means of pulling information across the Web to one site.

Blogger & Word Press
Students kept a learning journal throughout the term and were given a choice between Blogger and Word Press. I chose these applications because of their ease of use and customizablity.  I used to use Edublogs, but alas, the embedded advertising made my stomach turn.

Tumblr & Posterous
Students were invited to play with Tumblr and Posterous for projects involving audio, video and pictoral posting and sharing. I also introduced Flavors.me to create websites using personal content from around the Internet.

Twitter
We played with Twitter as a means of informal communication, formative assessments, social networking, personal learning, and sharing.

Flickr
Students were introduced to Flickr for photosharing and digital storytelling.

VoiceThread
We used VoiceThread to support teaching, learning, reflection, and collaborative learning. VoiceThread worked well when I was out of town as well. I could leave instructions and solicit feedback. Students also used VoiceThread as a broadcasting medium for providing instructions and how-to’s in their own lessons.

Social Bookmarking
While I am still experimenting with Diigo, students were introduced to Delicious to support bookmarking and resource searches.

Wikis
Students were given an option to use PBWorks and Wikispaces to support a collaborative Web presence. One of my major major emphases this term was communication with parents. Wikis are easy to create Web sites that require students to think about design as much as content. If a wiki is hard to navigate, it is hard to use. We spent time reflecting and acting on this particular design aspect as well.

Podcasting
Students and I tested Podomatic to support podcasting capabilities. Overall, it worked well and was simple to use effectively. I have used Audacity in the past, however, I wanted to try something different this time through.

Screencasting
Students were asked to develop a how-to video using either video or screencasting applications such as Screenr and Jing.

Chat
While we did not look too closely at chat applications, we talked about Tiny Chat, but only briefly…

Polling
Polleverywhere was a fun application to use for formative assessments and teaching about using personal learning networks to gather information and answers. Google Forms and Survey Monkey where also employed for formative assessments as well.

Animation
For fun, didactic experiences, and demonstration purposes, we played with Go Animate.

Open Educational Resources Commons (OER)
We explored a host of lesson plans available through OER Commons. We focused on the importance of sharing and modifying lesson plans (with an emphasis on re-sharing).

Open Text
For my student microteaching activity, I asked students to sign up for specific chapters in How People Learn. Students were asked to develop a 40 minute lesson on a specific chapter. Chapter presentations were not summaries, but focused on relevant aspects of the chapter content. Students were required to prepare a presentation, group and/or individual activities, and an assessment for the content presented. They were also forbidden to use PowerPoint (hee hee!).

PLE/PLN
In our investigations of personal/professional learning environments and personal/professional learning networks, we enjoyed Graham Attwell‘s Introduction to Personal Learning Environments (and his delicious Welsh accent) and Richard Byrne‘s presentation on How to Build a Personal Learning Network. Students were asked to join a network (e.g., Twitter, Plurk, Classroom 2.0, or FriendFeed) and describe who they followed, what they learned, and the ways they participated on their learning journal.

Browser
I regularly recommend Firefox as the browser to use. It integrates well into our online course management system, Moodle.

Video
Students and I used YouTube regularly to find and share audio visual resources. TeacherTube was also used to support knowledge building.

Finally, all tactics, texts, and presentations described were chosen because they are free and relatively easy to use and integrate into one’s curriculum. I have avoided prescribing proprietary software, applications, and texts in an effort to support the open sharing possibilities that the Web affords.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/csessums/4259696067/sizes/o/

Reimagining Complex Educational Models

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.” — Clay Shirky, The Collapse of Complex Business Models

After reading this quote from Shirky, I could not help but think of the current state of educational institutions across the U.S. The way most tax-based educational systems are constructed, there are limited ways in which these institutions can cut expenses below their revenue. Consequently, many educational institutions (read: schools, school districts, colleges) will fail and fail dramatically.

In Shirky’s analysis (based on the work of Joseph Tainter), complex societies and systems collapse because, “when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond.” When schools and colleges are unable to provide the services, support, skill and content knowledge necessary to support a changing and evolving world, then these institutions will collapse.

The affordances of social media and open educational resources are making the time and space used for formal education nearly worthless. Schools and colleges need to recognize this shift and develop new ways of thinking how to engage and support learners and learning.

Given the communal nature of schools perhaps we can begin thinking of them as a community organization that supports learning from cradle to death. The school house can become a place that supports and nurtures socially responsible community values such as health, education, sustainable growth and development. School clinics can serve as public health clinics providing medical, psychological, and social services to the community. Schools can become a place generations can mix, learn, and support one another. In essence, why can’t a school be the place that serves the community and that the community serves in return?

If we do not take the time to re-imagine the role of schools in our society now, we will soon be left with nothing but the rubble of good intention. This process of recycling our schools into useful social institutions does not require replacing the professional administrators currently in office. Instead, it will require you and me and the people of our community. I am currently exploring sets of protocols that can provide a means to begin the conversation that in turn can lead to meaningful action.

As Shirky deftly points out, “it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.” While this may appear as an over-simplification, until we get involved and work with these issues, we will never know. To paraphrase Shirky, when schools and educational institutions fail to respond to reduced economic circumstances and cannot create effective reform measures through orderly reflection and re-sizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t. This is important for educational reformers to think about. Yet, more importantly, this is something we as members of our local communities must addresses today.

image: via csessums  http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2121/4506467325_36818326eb.jpg

Excerpt from The Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future (Pew Internet)

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Institutional change surely will come, often starting at the periphery. There are market opportunities in offering services related to responsiveness, yet, big, traditional organizations such as school systems will be slow to adapt.**

“Ten years is too little for major changes. Efficiencies will of course occur, by automating more interactions – just as all became telephone operators, so we are increasingly all becoming travel agents, information managers, and so on. Small businesses will spring up that are more customer-centered and others will become more responsive at one level by some customized interfaces, but also more impersonal and less responsive to exceptional requests. On the whole, though, change here will be slow. Educational institutions will be the ones to watch, they are highly logical candidates for change, yet it is difficult to imagine much by 2020. By 2030, definitely.” – Jonathan Grudin, principal researcher, Microsoft

“There is a tipping point on the horizon between competition and cooperation. Scarcity of natural resources will require us to work together in ways we have never been required to before. It will take us a few generations to really see a significant change in the ways we currently do business, but it will come. This type of change requires us to plan for a long ‘now,’ which is antithetical to the way populist governments often work. Change will come from the edges and work its way toward the center. First, businesses will see the value-added new digital media provides in terms of access to markets and supporting quality interaction, distribution and customer feedback. This model will then be slowly adopted by government. I also believe the US is too big to govern the way it has been (thus all the red tape and claims of ineffective programming). Perhaps government would be more nimble as productive/supportive if it were to focus geographically (think Netflix or FedEx).” – Christopher D. Sessums, post-doctoral associate at the college of education, University of Florida**

** “This material was gathered in the fourth “Future of the Internet” survey conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center. The surveys are conducted through online questionnaires to which a selected group of experts and the highly engaged internet public have been invited to respond. The surveys present potential-future scenarios to which respondents react with their expectations based on current knowledge and attitudes. You can view detailed results from the 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2010 surveys here: http://www.pewinternet.org/topics/Future-of-the-internet.aspx and http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/expertsurveys/default.xhtml. Expanded results are published in the “Future of the Internet” series published by Cambria Press.”

http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Impact-of-the-Internet-on-Institutions-in-the-Future/Survey-Method.aspx?r=1