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.

INTASC

This link in this post shows that I tried as best I could to demonstrate that I have met the standards required my this class. This includes creating presentations using a variety of media, as well os demonstrating current and future applications for these media in a classroom. Check out the document at this link for further details.

My Experiences with Skype

I had several of years of experience with Skype before joining the education department here at Willamette (I've chosen not to share my Skype name because I chose an embarrassing one when I started my account and Skype wont let me change it). I first came across it while living in Japan as a free and easy way to keep in touch with my friends and family back home. I was attracted by the idea that I could speak with anyone, anywhere at anytime without having to worry about how much time I was spending while having sound quality greater than a normal telephone line, as well as the opportunity for live video. I used it the most to speak with my parents in Salem once a week. I also used it for group chats with friends in different parts of the world (in my case, me and a friend in souther Japan, one in Osaka and another in the United States). Difficulties I experienced include unpredictable data rates leading to reduced quality and unexpected dropped calls. On the whole, however, it was much easier to use and better quality (not to mention less expensive) than any phone line I have ever used.

For the same reason, especially given my connection with a school that has connections with Japan as a central part of its mission, Skype could be an excellent tool for my classroom. I have long wanted to set up a live chat with students in Japan, and a video chat through Skype would be a very nice way to do this. The most significant hurdle for me, matching class-times between America and Japan (which do not line up at all) has nothing to do with the tool itself and could be overcome by having one class come to school one day at an odd time. I haven't yet been able to set something like this up, but it remains a possibility that I would like to explore.

Multimedia Presentation

For my multimedia presentation I teamed with two other students to put together a presentation on uses for ScreenToaster, an online service that captures videos of the screen of your computer as you work on it. My contribution to the presentation was a video in which I demonstrated how to use the class web site that I had recently set up. I chose ScreenToaster because I thought it had potential to be something useful to me in my classroom. As it turns out it was simple and easy to use, and I can see myself using it in future lessons.

GoogleSheets Demonstration

This is my attempt to pull some visually and mathematically interesting information out of the table of test scores on our example sheet from Ed Tech class. The first table shows how each student fits into categories of standard deviation above and below the average for each test.



Green indicates more than one standard deviation above the mean, yellow indicates less than one standard deviation above the mean, orange indicates less than one standard deviation below the mean, and red indicates more than one standard deviation below the mean. This information can be useful for showing how students' standing compared with the rest of the class changed over time. Israel, for example, started off greater than one standard deviation below the mean (red) and finished greater than one standard deviation ABOVE the mean (green), a greater improvement relative to the class.



This graph shows the relative change of the mean, one standard deviation above and below the mean, and the maximum over the course of the tests. This shows that, on the whole, the class improved with each test over the grading period.

GoogleSheets Demonstration

Part I

Part II

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Web 2.0 Tutorial

Even though we have had plenty of exposure to Google Docs through our Ed Tech class, I thought it would be nice to share my perspective as a teacher at a school that is currently in the process of having our students use GoogleDocs as a normal part of their classwork. We're only a few weeks in, but it's been fun seeing how much we've already been able to accomplish, and I really am excited about the possibilities for this new tool in our classes.