OETS in My Classroom

OETS (Oregon Educational Technology Standards) is a set of standards designed to promote technological literacy in students. That these standards are necessary at all speaks to how central a part of daily life information technology has become in recent years. Record keeping in hospitals, international collaboration in business and online banking are all examples of areas in which information technology plays an important role, and if the function of school is to prepare students for the world than technological literacy must has a place in its curriculum. OETS is designed to standardize and clarify this, outlining ways in which technology and its appropriate use can be incorporated into more traditional classes.

It is worth noting that OETS does not refer to any specific technology (GoogleDocs, Facebook etc.). This is because technology changes so quickly that standards could not be revised quickly enough to keep up, and what students learned to use in school would likely be obsolete by the time they start working. Instead, OETS describes how technology should be used, leaving the teacher to determine which programs and devices are most appropriate to use at any given time.

I've been moderately literate with information technology most of my life, and so seeing the benefit of promoting technology use in the classroom has not been difficult for me to get used to. Though I teach 4th and 5th graders, whose ability to appropriately use technology is limited, there are several ways I have tried to incorporate in my class that reflect OETS. For one, information technology has played an important role in research projects I have assigned (3. Research and Information Fluency). I prefer to give students broad goals and let them determine for themselves how best to achieve them. In the field of research, it is up to the student to find sources that provide them with the best information. It is also important, however, that they are able to determine which sources are reliable and which are not, and so we also spend time in class discussing which types of web sites are likely to provide useful information. I have also used GoogleDocs to have students upload information they acquired outside of school to a common spreadsheet which then charts the results they obtained as a class. Through this they have seen for themselves the value in working as a group to gather the most accurate results possible (2. Communication and Collaboration). I have also talked to my students about how how serious an issue plagiarism is, and how important it is to make use of the ideas contained in the information they find without copying the words directly (5. Digital Citizenship). Finally, students need to learn to fend for themselves when using technology, as the software they used in 5th grade will be obsolete when they are in high school. I try as much as possible to encourage students to become familiar with technology through using it rather than through direct instruction so that they will be better able to learn for themselves how to use the "next big thing" that becomes popular (6. Technology Operations and Concepts)

One difficulty I've had with using technology in my classroom is that my students' parents are for the most part unfamiliar with it themselves, meaning that they can only receive a limited amount of help at home. It has also been difficult at times to convince them of the value of using technology over more traditional methods in some situations. Finally, there will almost certainly come a time when the state of the art moves beyond what I myself am comfortable with, making it difficult for me to incorporate it into my own classes. This is already a stumbling block for many current teachers. As information technology continues to play more and more of a central role in the world, however, incorporating it effectively into my classes will become increasingly important, and thanks to OETS I now have a way to gauge my effectiveness in this area.