I use a lot of technology in my classroom. I'm fortunate, my school board has blanket WIFI access, LCD projectors, a computer in every room and a computer lab on every floor. I regularly use the document camera, mobi, interactive simulations, powerpoints and clickers. I've created assignments that enable students to learn how to parse, evaluate and report information efficiently using both the web and Microsoft Office programs. But something in me still stays, that I can use technology in a better way, I can use it to improve the way I teach. When I look at my students, the question facing me is, how can I use technology to transform the way my students learn?
A few weeks ago, our IT Resource Teacher came to speak to our department. He outlined the SAMR model of technology integration. The
SAMR model describes the natural process of integrating technology into teaching and learning. The SAMR model can also be though of in terms of iterative task improvement. SAMR stands for:
- Substitution - technology is a direct tool substitute, does not change the task
- Augmentation - new technology is a direct tool substitute that ends up enhancing the task
- Modification - the task is redesigned o take advantage of the capabilities of the new technology
- Redefinition - a new task is made possible by the capability of the new technology
It can be said that as a task progresses through the four stages of SAMR technology integration, the task starts to allow students to work at progressively higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. After all, the goal of integrating technology is to enable richer learning, enabling students to engage their community, both in the school and further.
So what does this look like in terms of an assignment? I decided to work on implementing technology into a "statistics in the news" assignment that I use with my grade 11 math students. My goal was to take technology beyond the "substitution" phase of integration, into the "modification" and and "redefinition" stage.
We integrated both blogging and infographics into the assignment. Blogging completely redefined the task purpose, since blogging is only possible with web access and a blog tool. Using infographics modified the task to take the statistical graphing portion of the course to new levels, previously not possible. I'm very pleased with the result. Here are the before and after descriptions:
Before: Statistics in the News Assignment
Students research articles online, summarizing the article and explaining the meaning of the statistics therein. Students create a realistic numerical problem that uses the information gathered from the article.
Reinvented: Statistics in the News Assignment
Students research articles with statistics, then create an infographic that highlights statistics in an interesting and probing manner, they post their article summary and infographic to the class blog for other class members to comment.
More information:
Blog Sites
If you would like to start blogging with your class, kidblog.org and edublogs.org are two great sites that allow you to create generic student accounts and use a variety of control measures including enabling moderation (the monitoring of comments and/or posts before they are viewed by a public).
Creating Infographics
Infographics are images that convey data in a sophisticated and influential way. There are a lot of free websites that allow can make them easily via the computer. Take a peek at these sites:
Excellent SAMR Model Background and Exemplars are found here on the
www.hippasus.com website.
