#1:
My cooperating teacher was only familiar with NETS, but was not knowledgable in specific standards. His reaction, upon looking at the standards for his grade level, was that he was already implementing most of the concepts and standards anyways. My cooperating teacher does a technology based music course, and so students are constantly using computers. Besides teaching music, he often takes time to strengthen their computer skills through assigned projects. For example, during a podcasting unit last semester, the students were unfamiliar with formatting documents in microsoft word, as well as checking their sources for validity in researching. We spent thirty minutes that day reinforcing good formatting and search skills.
#2:
I can only speak for Randolph High School ,in terms of implementation of NETS -- This has been my single placement for fieldwork and student teaching. Randolph throws a lot of their excess money into technology, however most teachers are not trained or aware of NETS in their lesson planning. The school is so large that classroom access to technology varies from mac labs to room that don’t even have a projector. RHS also uses blackboard and genesis, which in theory could be used to achieve some NETS objectives, however most students barely use it or not at all. Students rarely check their emails, either. Overall, the culture of the school with use of technology is poor, but with pockets of rich classes such as the mass media department, or my music technology classes.
#3:
I was not surprised with my teacher’s responses because he is in his 60’s and has gone through dozens of standards and policy changes. Over the course of my fieldwork and student teaching I have discovered that many concepts such as “transfer” and “best practice” have been around for a very long time, but were just coined to be different terms in different pedagogical texts. I was shown some of these older standards and texts by my co-op. Overall, I speak with my co-op on the significance of technology in education every day (I teach a music technology course right now five days a week). A lot of our work relies on the concept of transferability, that a student who learns a concept will carry that skill to foreign situations, and synthesize it with other concepts. I tend to teach the concepts behind programs and computers more so than the software itself, because software is always changing. My co-op and I feel this is still a risk because “transfer” is still merely a pedagogical theory and has not been scientifically proven to be true.
#4:
I believe that simply stating something like, “You’re supposed to be implementing NETS, you should look at this website” would get absolutely nothing done in my school district, or with my peers. I think it all starts with genuine conversation about where our students’ interests and strengths lie, and how the standards are suggestions to enhance curriculums. For example, I recently used www.polleverywhere.com with my students for a quiz review. I did this to demonstrate to my co-op a quick and free way (without smartboard) to use tech to make review more fun. Poll everywhere allows students to submit via text message their answers to multiple choice questions anonymously. The students were much more engaged seeing the percentage of different answers across the classroom. Without the fear of being wrong (anonymous is great!) I was able to then determine which misconceptions in the content were prevalent and review the best answers with everyone. What I am saying is -- lead by example! When peers and other teachers see you do meaningful things with technology, they are likely to follow suit. If you make tech use a gimmick, teachers who are less comfortable will not join in.
----------------
Link to my spreadsheet from Interactivity #4: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmJL5kf39jyJdHZnbk4yYU8zakhZN2dhUENGb3RqT0E