Evaluating Technology Use : Chapter 7

Chapter Seven gave me a ton of ideas on how to evaluate the many things that we’ve learned about up until this point. First of all, the book breaks down what makes a technology “appropriate” for use in the classroom: it has to be suitable for the educational situation, it should motivate the student, facilitate learning at students level of learning (should adjust to meet learning level of every student, in my opinion), it must also meet curriculum standards and complete learning objectives (laid out by the teacher BEFORE the lesson). I also thought it was interesting and useful to know the evaluation cycle, which suggests evaluating the lesson before it is taught, while it is being taught (gauging student interest and what parts are the most interesting can help during the next step) and finally evaluate after the lesson is finished. I suppose the main point of the final evaluation is to help hammer out what you should and shouldn’t do next time the lesson is taught.


I’ve learned about authentic assessment in my introduction to education class, and I’ve always thought that it was one of the best ways to evaluate students. It involves putting together a portfolio of sorts that contains projects, written and revised work, student research, etc. As a teacher, I won’t be able to escape testing my students as well, and I would also include tests, quizzes and class work in their portfolios. Authentic assessment, the book tells us, stems from authentic learning which helps students tie what they do in class into the real world, answering that age old questions that students love to throw out at teachers, “When will I ever use this in real life?”.


This chapter might have offered me the best suggestions of things I will actually use in the classroom. In the beginning of the chapter the book says that school districts and Department of Education’s often provide lists of approved software, some sites and districts even offer evaluations of certain approved software. I also think that attending conferences and talking to my colleagues about what their experiences have been using certain programs would be the most useful. It’s hard to read a review on a website and be sure that what they are saying is true, but if you get the information from a school board organized conference or a trusted colleague or even the Department of Education’s website, I would feel much more comfortable bringing that software into my classroom. I also think that the EDTECH mailing list would be a great tool for me, at least in my first few years of teaching. I also plan on using a lot of the information presented in the several project evaluation checklists to create my own grading rubrics (content, planning, creativity, etc.). I also liked the idea of a web scavenger hunt because I really enjoyed the one that we did in class (a lot of those websites I found in that hunt I will use as a teacher) as well as the Language Arts integration sheet; it laid out objectives and actually showed me how I would go about creating a lesson plan for something that integrated technology.

Intigrating Technology: Chapter 6

I definitely liked chapter 6 much more than most of the other chapters. It’s fun for me to think of all the things I will get to do once I’m in my own classroom. Something that really struck me out of chapter 6 is that the text tells us that with the integration of technology into the classroom, the teacher becomes a facilitator of learning. Instead of standing in front of room and dictating everything your students should know and should learn, you become a driving force to help the students learn for themselves, on their own. In this day and age I feel that students need to feel independence, they need to learn how to rely on their own brains. I feel that a lot of teachers today focus on getting students to regurgitate information, this approach forces teachers to let students learn for themselves.

Page 343 tells us that by integrating technology into the classroom, the students become more engaged in what they are learning, taking a more active role in the learning process. It goes on to say that students create their own learning and the teacher should assist students in becoming active learners, not just tell them what they should know. The previous page tells us that technology helps motivate students, and can even increase students desire to attend class. Technology also helps teachers cater to students with different learning styles and disabilities.

Technology is constantly changing the way we communicate, surf the web, and with the invention of Tivo and DVR’s, even the way we watch television. It’s no surprise to me that technology is changing the way students are being taught, in fact it makes me more excited to become a teacher. Think of all the resources I’ll have! Things from this chapter I plan to bring into my classroom is definitely the ASSURE model. I think that if more teachers could put such thought and planning into each lesson, they could reach more students. No wonder most students aren’t interested in school, the technology that they love outside of school isn’t correctly utilized by most teachers in the classroom. You have to draw off of what students already know, and I think the ASSURE model helps with that. I also liked the website they featured called Mighty Mentors, where teachers can sign up to be a mentor or mentee who communicate through e-mail. It’s like having a pen pal who has been where you are now and can help answer any questions or offer support, or give you tips. I definitely plan on signing up for such a service when I become a teacher.

Chapter 5: the digital invasion!

Throughout this entire chapter I just kept asking myself: “What will the students loose by using all of these interactive computer programs?” Sure, interactive websites and programs that allow your students to virtually tour Africa or the human body but are there things that are lost? I feel that some of these programs trade actual experience for accessibility. If there is a dinosaur exhibit at the local museum, I would much rather take my students to the museum so they physically see everything rather than experience it through a computer screen. On the other hand, touring Africa through the computer (seeing as you can’t really take a class to Africa) seems to me, better than reading about Africa out of a textbook. I think that digital media and everything it entails does have it’s place in educational instruction, but when it becomes an easy way out for lazy teachers, I think the students miss out on a lot.


Computer and Web based training seem like they are the next new trend in business and education. I don’t think that enough people realize the benefits of being trained one-on-one with another human, though. You can’t ask a computer a detailed question, you would have to search FAQ and if your question has several parts that could take quite a while. And what if FAQ and the Help function don’t have the answer to your question? You have to call the customer service hotline for said software or website and try to find someone who can help you. It seems to me that if you want your students or your workers trained right, you would ask someone who knows their job well to help instruct them, not sit them down in front of a computer. This world seems to be loosing it’s ties with person to person interaction: cell phones, laptops, instant messages, text messages, e-mail -- all of these things that help us maintain in contact with people without ever having to see them. Social interaction is crucial to student development, if all the teacher does is plop the student down in front of a computer and expect them to learn everything they need to learn, the teacher is useless. Teachers are needed to personally guide students through the journey of learning, something that I don’t feel computers are able to do.


I think that using virtual tours to expose students to far away places that they may never have physical access to is great, and I plan on using such tools in my classroom. I will not use such tools to show students things that they can go out and see for themselves (I plan on teaching in south Florida, and I would take my students to the Henry Morrison Flager Museum so they could actually see everything rather than simply show them the virtual tour online). Another thing I really plan on implementing in my classroom is electronic reference programs, such as Encarta. I remember using Encarta when I was in elementary school and I loved the pictures, audio, video and such that Encarta had available. I haven’t looked at the program in several years, I’m sure that it covers so much more material now. I think that students can learn well from such software because it appeals to many different learning styles, as does most digital media. Lastly I think that tutorial software can be beneficial to non-English speaking students as well as students who are not reading or comprehending at their grade level (I want to teach high school English/Language Arts so all the math/science software is quite irrelevant to me). I would only use tutorials as tutorials though, I believe that the teacher should do the instructing and the software and digital media should be used to reinforce what the teacher wants the students to learn.

Chapter Four Response

I’m not going to lie, I found chapter 4 to be a bit less informative than chapter 3, as far as technologies that I feel can be applied in a classroom setting. I’ve had my own computer since I was in 6th grade, so I suppose I know most of what I know about devices and where they go from experience. A few things I read about did surprise me though. I found the pen input devices quite intriguing but I can’t imagine that the technology for such a device is perfected to the point that it will recognize everything written. It’s a very interesting take on something similar to a tablet PC but I feel like the tablet PC would work better because you are writing on the PC instead of writing with an instrument that is picking up your movements through sensors in the pens tips. The pen input devices that take up to 100 pictures a second and then transfer them to memory are quite interesting. If pen input devices can accurately understand even the messiest handwriting, I would say that they should be studied in classrooms to see how students react to them. I should think they would create a lot less distraction than a tablet PC would.


Digital cameras and flash drives both have their places in education. Kids of all ages can have their pictures taken with their work and then their teacher can display either the work or the photo, and the student can take either the photo or the work home, so that their parents can see the work and yet it is still in the classroom for all the students classmates to see. This can also be a way for students to documents projects for their portfolios, some projects are too big to include in file folder. The teacher can also keep a photo-log of all projects turned in, which would help cut down cheating (students turning in a student from a previous years project as their own, etc). Flashdrives allow students to work on a project at school and then take it home and work on it at home, and all they have to do is load the project on the flashdrive, take it home, update it when they are done and bring it back to school where they can show their teachers their projects, print their work or continue working.


In the Teaching Today section they speak of Podcasts and how universities are using them, uploading lectures, PowerPoint’s, etc and giving incoming freshman ipods so that they may utilize such technologies. I think this is very effective for college students (even though I feel it encourages students not to attend class) but I’m not sure if I feel that it would be effective for what I want to teach, high school. I think that high school students might take advantage of their knowledge of such technology and for their older teachers lack of knowledge. This is one of the biggest problems with technology is that the students know more than most of the teachers. Podcasts might be effective for college students but I feel that high school students need personal, sometimes one-on-one instruction and interaction. Podcasting lectures and lessons, in my opinion, makes actually attending class obsolete and I feel that students need personal observation and attention, they need face to face instruction for maximum learning intake. In the Software Corner they spoke of a program called Make-A-Story that helps students become more involved in the characters, plots and such in stories that you are reading. I want to teach high school and I feel that there aren’t many programs out there for high school level students, let alone the subject I want to teach, English. There are tons of math and science programs and there don’t seem to be many programs for English or Language Arts. Or perhaps they are and I am just not aware of them yet… that is why I’m in this class, isn’t it?


* Peer response: I read Malcolm's blog (I haven't met him yet but he is actually my site supervisor for a mentoring program I'll be volunteering with so I was naturally drawn to his blog because I recognized his name!) and I quite agree with what he has to say as far as input devices. I myself never knew that keyboards and such all fell under an actual catagory (I figured everything from printers to external harddrives to keyboards all fell under Accessories!) so it was interesting to learn their "title" if you will. I agree when he says that we should know what we are using is called and he's right. I don't think that teachers need to know everything in the world (but they should know exactly where to be able to find it) but I think they should know the things they use on a daily or weekly basis inside and out. I also agree with him when he says that he feels most of us aren't learning new things, it's more we are just being made aware of these things (like input devices!).