New Tech Standards & Requirements

The Oregon Ed Tech Standards (OETS) are a set of standards where the goal seems to be to have teachers and students become competent and and literate in the field of technology.  The standards outline ways that allow for technology to be incorporated into the classroom in ways that benefit learning.  These skills can then be used outside the classroom in other life long projects and events.

Following are the standards that stuck out to me the most and how I might implement them in my classroom:

• Creativity and Innovation:  Students can research the origins of constellations.  Using technology, students can use the program Stellarium to see the constellations in the sky with lines that connect all the stars, pictures of what the constellations are and labels for each constellation.  Students can create presentations on their findings using google presentations and use Stellarium to show what their constellation looks like with and without the lines.
• Communication and Collaboration:  Not only can students create a google doc for their group projects, they can also work on a project with people in a different state.  Students can work on projects outside of school hours without having to figure out where, when, or how they are all going to meet up because they can all work from their homes.  Students can also work with another class from a different state on a unit project.  For instance, if a class in Oregon is learning about New York, they can create a google do to get information about New York from every student in a sister class.  The New York class can then do a project on Oregon, getting information from all of the students in their sister class in Oregon.
• Critical Thinking, Problem Solving and Decision Making:  Investigating environmental health, students will compose questions and hypotheses using critical thinking skills.  They can then use technology to research and test their hypotheses.  They can also engage people from other communities/states/countries to compare data using a google doc.  Based on the data in the shared google doc, the students can research local resources that may be able to help them solve their question(s).  Using that information, the students can create a presentation on the method/strategy they have decided would work best to solve their hypothesis.

One of the big challenges trying to met the educational technology standards is the access to technology.  Not all schools have technology for students to use often enough to become technologically literate.  Another challenge is having teachers who are capable of using technology and teach students how to use it; technology is always changing and evolving.  How do you know what is important enough to know to incorporate into learning and what to leave for students to explore on their own?  Ways these challenges might be overcome is to use whatever technology is available.  Use it for little things as well as big projects.  Let the students play with the technology that is available to them in the classroom and the school.  As a teacher, it is important to stay up to date on how technology is evolving and how it can be used in the classroom; use technology that is relevant to students and their work and what might be relevant in their futures.