Ok, I know, that may sound bad coming from a technology guy for a school district.  But if you really want to help your students succeed, and you want technology to be a catalyst for that change, then you need to think about the instruction first.

There seems to be trend in education and technology.  Find what’s popular with technology (i.e. blogs, glogster, podcasting, twitter) and then have your students do it everywhere!   “Hey kids, start podcasting about your math homework!”.  “After you finish your writing project I want you to blog about it”.  But what is that doing for your students?  More importantly, how is that improving your instruction?  Are there benefits to blindly adding these? Absolutely.  Students will be collaborating, publishing, creating.  These are all wonderful things!  But we can often get lost in the tech and forget about the core content of our lesson.

My theory for effective implementation of technology into instruction is to look at the lesson first.  What are we teaching?  What is our objective?  How have we taught this in the past?  What is the content?  Then we look at all of the technologies and webtools available and ask a few questions.  How will this technology improve understanding?  How will this increase engagement?  How will this allow my students to use higher order thinking skills?  How will adding this technology improve my lesson?  I know this may sound obvious to many reading this, but I guarantee that in the early stages of this push for increased use of technology in the classroom, this mentality is unfortunately the minority.

I’ll admit, I am biased.  I think that technology has the ability to improve EVERY lesson.  However, that doesn’t mean that it is always the piece that makes the lesson great.  There are many lessons that I have taught students that consisted of the class, myself, a discussion circle, and nothing else.  We had some ground-breaking moments in those discussions.  We solved some world problems.  We collaborated.  We used higher order thinking skills.  We used not a single piece of technology.  And it was FUN and engaging!  But as teachers we always look for ways to take our students to the next level.  We want the very best for them.  We want all of our lessons to be show-stoppers.  As you look at revitalizing your lessons in the future just remember, look at the instruction first, let the technology evolve from the content, and your students will benefit immensely!