One of our goals at Arey Jones is to give our schools and teachers the resources they need to make the most of the technology they have in the classroom. We came across this article by Stephanie Novak from the International Society for Technology in Education that hits on the challenges and the opportunities that come with integrating technology into the Common Core curriculum.
In it, Novak addresses seven ways to welcome and embrace technology in your classroom, broken down and paraphrased as follows.
- Don’t Try To Learn Everything At Once
Channel the growth mindset you teach your students when it comes to technology in the classroom. It’s not that you are not a master of classroom technology; you aren’t a master of classroom technology YET. Take your time and take it one at a time. - Don’t Reinvent Your Curriculum
Common Core has been around for years, and textbook publishers have grown and changed to accommodate it. Use technology to support your current efforts, allowing teachers and administrators access to new materials, lesson plans, resources, and ideas to help breathe new life into your material and engage students in a whole new way. - Integrate The Interactive
Whether you begin with blogs or welcome the wiki, find a platform that allows your students to send their ideas and work to you in an easy and accessible way. Students are often encouraged to show what they know and understand within the Common Core framework, and these personal publishing platforms are a great way to do it. - Who’s Ready For Podcasts?
Don’t be intimidated by podcasts, the popular method of sharing information via live and recorded feeds. Using Audio, Visual, and Video—or a combination of all three—students can represent their knowledge with graphics, images, vocabulary, and video in unique and collaborative ways. - Keep Parents In The Loop
Keeping parents informed while reducing the amount of paper that goes home is getting harder and harder. To communicate effectively, classrooms, schools, and districts have to engage their parent network in a way that is both clear and easy to use. More and more schools are turning to online and mobile tools to keep their families informed of important deadlines, school-wide events, and student progress. - Expand Your Classroom Environment
Who says learning has to stay in the classroom? Use and share multimedia clips and videos to help hammer subject matter home—and then make the clips accessible from home. - Give Them The “Write” Stuff
With acronyms, emojis, and shortened text taking over our student vocabulary, it takes some serious instruction to help them communicate effectively with each other and across generations, cultures, platforms, and subject matters. There are many great resources available to teachers to support them in their Common Core objectives, including ways to incorporate additional media elements, like video and live interviews.
The author goes on to include relevant applications, books, and resources as she dives into details, so don't miss a word of it. Read the full article here.
Common Core was designed to help students be more prepared for college and career, and technology will play an imperative role in both. And it all starts with what you do now.
What do you think about Common Core? Let us know!