According to Robert Marzano, "Standards hold the greatest hope for significantly improving student achievement."
ISTE Standards for Students were created for this very reason. ISTE maintains: "Today’s students must be prepared to thrive in a constantly evolving technological landscape. The ISTE Standards for Students are designed to empower student voice and ensure that learning is a student-driven process." These standards were created at the national level.
Let's explore the ISTE standards:
1. Empowered Learner - Students leverage technology to take an active role in choosing, achieving, and demonstrating competency in their learning goals, informed by the learning sciences.
2. Digital Citizen - Students recognize the rights, responsibilities and opportunities of living, learning and working in an interconnected digital world, and they act and model in ways that are safe, legal and ethical.
3. Knowledge Constructor - Students critically curate a variety of resources using digital tools to construct knowledge, produce creative artifacts and make meaningful learning experiences for themselves and others.
4. Innovative Designer - Students use a variety of technologies within a design process to identify and solve problems by creating new, useful or imaginative solutions.
5. Computational Thinker - Students develop and employ strategies for understanding and solving problems in ways that leverage the power of technological methods to develop and test solutions.
6. Creative Communicator - Students communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats and digital media appropriate to their goals.
7. Global Collaborator - Students use digital tools to broaden their perspectives and enrich their learning by collaborating with others and working effectively in teams locally and globally.
Standards also exist on a local level in Alabama. They were created with extensive use of the ISTE standards for students. The Alabama Course of Study: Digital Literacy and Computer Science provides the framework for the study of technology from Kindergarten through Grade 12 in Alabama’s public schools. These standards for content are fundamental but not exhaustive, and they provide the minimum content requirements for each grade.
To help teachers successfully implement technology standards in classrooms, several exceptional frameworks have been created. They are TPACK, SAMR, TECH, and PRIMM.
TPACK was created to help align technical, pedagogical, and content knowledge.
SAMR helps teachers design lessons using technology that engage higher order thinking skills, promote rich learning experiences, and impact student achievement.
The SAMR model is defined below:
Substitution – Technology acts as a direct tool substitute, with no functional change.
Augmentation – Technology acts as a direct tool substitute, but with functional improvements.
Modification - Technology allows for significant task redesign.
Redefinition - Technology allows for the creation of new tasks that were previously inconceivable.
Substitution and Augmentation are the lowest levels of technology integration in the SAMR model. Enhancement of education has occurred, but lessons have not yet reached the transformative level. Modification and Redefinition are the highest levels of the model in which transformation occurs. Here, students begin analyzing, evaluating, and creating their own data and tasks.
TECH was created to help teachers think of the SAMR model in a way that focuses on people rather than tasks.
TECH aligns well with the SAMR model:
Traditional - Teacher designs the lessons with traditional pedagogy but with technology supports.
Enhanced - Teacher integrates multiple technological tools in a way that enhances the learning experience.
Choice - Teacher sets broad goals for students in which they are able to choose from various technological tools to accomplish a chosen task.
Handoff - Students' interest drives the learning experience with teacher guidance and flexible choice of tools and technologies to achieve and authentic and exemplary product.
PRIMM is a framework used for teaching computer programming to students.
The PRIMM model is defined below:
Predict - Read through the code and write down what one thinks will happen.
Run - What happened when the code was run?
Investigate - Why does the code behave in a certain manner?
Modify - Make changes to the code to help aid in one's understanding.
Make - Write one's own code to solve problems.
This module has helped me understand how the various technology integration frameworks apply to the lessons I will present. I am particularly inspired by the element of global collaboration.
In future lessons, I will seek ways to allow my students to connect with others across the globe. I particularly enjoy teaching science, and I have a love of gardening. As I teach Life Science going forward, I would love to have my students collaborate with students in an area with a similar climate and compare the differences in agricultural techniques. Ideally, each set of students would be allowed to cultivate their own garden plots, record and analyze data using spreadsheets and other tools, and collaborate with others concerning ways to improve existing agricultural techniques.
Additionally, I would love to introduce a unit on robotics where students must choose their own design and create their own robots using limited resources. With a background in IT, I would enjoy teaching students basic coding techniques that would be helpful with this project. PRIMM will come in handy with this unit!
In the past, I have had my students cultivate a garden plot, and I have had them use technology to learn and collaborate with one another, but I love the idea of infusing technology in ways that will help my students further engage in rich learning experiences with their peers across the world. I also love the idea of virtual field trips to places we would otherwise not be able to visit. Finally, I keenly realize that with all this technology comes the responsibility to teach my students to be good digital citizens.
