Video Discussion Board 1

Discussion Topic:
How does the effective teacher balance the demand of a standards-based curriculum catered to the individual needs of each student? What tools do we have at our disposal to help us comply with both demands? What best-practices regarding technology in your instruction do you incorporate into your lessons?

Transcript:
“One of the biggest challenges I faced this year in my classroom was being tasked to utilize a wonderful resource for reading instruction that went against all parts of our standards-based reading report card. Essentially, we were using a program that taught analytic phonics, then assessing our students based on synthetic phonics rules. So how, as teachers, did we balance this demand? We had to teach both, which produced very confused kindergartners. This is not what technology use should be in the classroom. Technology is not a tool that we should use because we are forced to integrate technology in some way; technology is a resource used to enhance our instruction. When talking about adapting content to the student, “a student with visual disabilities will have great difficulty acquiring visually presented material, regardless of prior knowledge and skill in the subject area” (Jonassan et al., 2008, p.280). We may have to teach the standards-based material, but it is to our discretion how we present the material to the students. It is our job to do so in a way that best fits their individual needs.

We have endless technological tools at our disposal, but we need to have clear set instructional goals and student-oriented goals to choose our technology use wisely. Roblyer tells us that “teachers who develop technological pedagogical content knowledge strategically and simultaneously consider their knowledge of pedagogy, content, and technology to design and integrate technologies into content-based teaching” (2019, p. 17-18).  In order to balance student needs with our requirements in our Common Core standards, it is important that these standards be decomposed and well understood before we approach them. We need to choose tools and resources that teach the content better than we can. Make sure that technology is aligned with our standards and used when a child can learn better through it.

References

Jonassen, D., Spector, M. J., Driscoll, M., Merrill, M. D., van Merrienboer, J., Driscoll, M. P. (2008). Handbook of research on educational communications and technology (3rd ed.) Routledge.

Roblyer, M. & Hughes, J. (2019). Integrating educational technology into teaching: Transforming learning across disciplines (8th ed.) Pearson.