Grounded Technology Integration

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Wednesday was our first class for CI 302! We discussed many different topics that we will be going over throughout the semester. Our first task was to read an article titled Grounded Technology Integration by Judi Harris and Mark Hofer. The article went over different ways that technology is integrated into the classroom and ways that it actually should be. Harris and Hofer continue to go through a five step process to help teachers bring education to technology, not technology to education. They focus on the fact that although technology is becoming a big part of our classroom, we still need to make our student's needs the first priority.

The first step of Harris and Hofer's five step process was to choose learning goals. This is talking about picking a state curriculum standard to focus on. The second step is to make pedagogical descisions. Teachers must decide what the focus of the learning experience is, what students should be developing, what students already know, what students should gain, the amount of time the lesson will take, the best fit structure, and any other resources needed. After deciding what is best-fit for the lesson, teachers can move on to the third step: select activity types to combine. Teachers can now decide what learning activities will best help the students develop. Teachers who are interested can focus on TPACK (technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge) to help them come up with the best-fit curriculum based learning activities. The fourth steph is to select assessment strategies. The teacher must decide what will best "gauge student progress in achieving the targeted learning goal," (Harris & Hofer, 2009). Finally, the fifth step is to select tools/resources. This section explains one more time to readers that teachers should not make their classrooms "technocentric." Teachers need to focus on picking learning goals and then adding technology that can support the goal, not picking technology and forming goals around it. Harris and Hofer both agree that they want teachers to have intructional decision making power in creating a successful curriculum that focuses on student's needs.

This article was very interesting to me. It really made me think about the way that teachers use or even mis-use technology in their classrooms. Having technology in a classroom is great. Teachers do need to make sure that they are using it in a way that benefits their students. My goal as a teacher who wants to use technology is to integrate technology into my curriculum where it best fits, but not to integrate my curriculum into technology. The part of the article that sticks with me the most is this main point: that we need to intergrate technology into our lessons and not make lessons based on our technology. Harris and Hofer brought this back to perspective for me and is an article I reccommend that future educators read. There are many times that educators are making their classrooms technocentric. When visiting schools that are one to one or have different sorts of technology integration opportunities, I love to see how they incorporate it. When doing one of my practicum visits I was able to see this happen. The teacher was great with what she was doing. She used technology every day, but she used it to support her lesson. It was a math lesson she was doing. This teacher did not find the application and then center her lesson around it, she used the smartboard and ipads to complement, engage, and help her students during the lesson. This resonates with with because it was a great use of technology. I feel as if this teacher would support Harris and Hofer just like I do. I agree completely with Harris and Hofer. I do believe that sometimes it is hard to use technology in the correct forms for some people, but with the right knowledge on TPACK and combining technolgy, content knowledge, and pedagogy, educators will be well on their way to a successful classroom!