Focus Question: How can teachers use
technology to make decisions about meeting educational standards in their
lesson plans?
Teachers have to make a lot of
decisions when it comes to hat hey teach their students. There are national and local standards that
are used in determining what areas need to be taught and this can be obtained
online on the websites for each. Being
able to look up national standards for example would be a great help in
deciding how far you want to go with a lesson and the sites for these standards
even offer example lesson plans. This
would help tremendously and make it a LOT faster than trying to read them from
books or periodicals. There are also
sites for lesson planning available that even give you tips on how to teach the
lessons using various forms of technology such as Keyote.
Tech Tool 4.3
The websites and apps described in
Tech Tools 4.3 all seem to be designed to make a teachers life so much easier
and make him/her more efficient. Android
for Academics has five different apps that can help such as Grade Book for
Professors. You can have a pin-protected
one-stop place to put in and update your student’s grades and have the correct
one at any given moment. I like a lot of
these sites and apps, but there seems to be one for this and one for that. Being able to have a gradebook and attendance
records and rubric help all in one spot would be ideal for me.
Chapter 4 goes over lesson planning and
all the help that is available for teachers online with many programs and apps
to develop what they needs for national, state and local standards. It amazes me how far we have come. Years ago none of this was available and
teachers had to do a lot of busy work to get the information they needed. Now it is at their fingertips in a flash!
The part of this Chapter I found
most interesting was learning about assessments of students and how testing
regularly can show a teacher what needs to be worked on and what doesn’t throughout
the year. I see my son getting reports
from assessment tests and can see his progress from beginning to end. There are different ways teachers and schools
do this, but the bottom line is that they are a very important and useful tool
for both teachers and students.
Resources:
Textbook
- Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf,
Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd
Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.
Academy Geeks Inc. (2010). Android for Academics. [Picture].
Retrieved from http://androidforacademics.com/.
Academy Geeks Inc. (2010). Android for Academics. [Video].
Retrieved from http://androidforacademics.com/2011/01/attendance-app-video-demo/.
Assessments can be both formative, which provides that good feedback along the way, or summative, which are used for finality. Unfortunately, the sole dependence on standardized tests as both types, but especially summative, means we are neglecting other aspects of learning (i.e., creativity, problem-solving, etc). With standardized tests, we are generally limited to more knowledge-based questions which are considered lower-level thinking skills.
ReplyDeleteI would have to agree. I see the important of testing, obviously this needs to be done to not only make sure a student is understanding, but also to make sure the student isn't bored! This happens a lot and the standardized tests only show they know the material in the tests. It doesn't show if they are too advanced for that material (or behind as well). I have met several children that are so bored in clas they hate school, but they are SO eager to learn it is unreal. I prefer formative tests and beleive they give a better picture of what a students NEEDS, not just what they have learned.
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