It may surprise some, but in no way do I think technology should drive curriculum.
In 2007 I interviewed at my current District for an instructional technology job. I'd never heard of any District doing this and I was trying to get closer to home, so I thought, what the heck, I'll give it a whirl. I certainly didn't know of a job like that in other states; if there were, I wasn't involved in social media AT ALL (but really was there much of anything in 2007??) in order to have any idea of this kind of job in existence elsewhere.
The situation at that time was basically this: SMART Boards were the rage and all of the rooms were getting them installed at the HS. At Kent State University, I had worked with them where I worked in the education building and the District (shout out to North Ridgeville!) I was in had them, so I'd been using them already in my classroom. In addition, the District was switching to an online grading/attendance system for the first time, and again, I had worked in a District that had already been using an online system.
So why am I telling you all of this when the question was about technology driving curriculum or vice versa? Here's a slide from my initial interview with the District on what I thought the role of technology in education was:
Here were my notes to accompany that slide:
- Educational technology is any technology used by educators in support of the teaching and learning process
- Technology that enhances teaching and supports the learning process [Lever-Duffy, J., McDonald, J. B., Mizell, A. P. (2005). Teaching and Learning with Technology. Pearson Education, Inc. Boston: MA]
- Teachers should use technology to help differentiate their instruction in order to meet the different levels of learning that exist in the classroom; from the academically struggling to the academically gifted student
- Using the SB, for example, to diagram content standards & items they match up with in the text could help the visual learner
- The up-side of this versus the chalkboard or whiteboard is that, not only is it colorful & captures attention, but is crisp & clear; it can be printed for a student that was absent or saved & posted on a website [US – 21-2, page 10; 18-4, page 10; 16-3, page 1] [WH – 20-2, page 1; 16-1, page 10]
- When students use technology in the classroom it helps keep them as current as possible in our technology-enhanced society.
- Because it engages students with different modalities (auditory, visual, tactile) it increases time on task & has the potential to lower discipline problems
- The skills that they learn will help them to become more competitive in the college learning community and job market upon graduation from Mentor High School
So slight changes here and there (OGT is going away and Standards have changed; truthfully I don't use the SB like I used to because I have everything on my website and Google Drive), but overall I still believe the same message. *the items listed in [ ] were linked examples from my own work at the time
The shift that is more important to me now is from earning the most points possible in a course to proving mastery of the content, being able to explain that content in a relevant, meaningful way, and more of a PBL approach to instruction. Do I have to, or need to, have tons of technology for any of that? Of course not. Does it make it easier and give students a chance to use their creativity in a different way? I think so. Have I mastered all of this and implemented it successfully within my own classroom? Without a doubt, far from it. But that's where I want to get to.
#2moredays :)
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