1--Technology+Integration

This assignment is intended to build up my knowledge background on technology integration in the classroom. The links within the document are active, but if any of them should become dead, please notify me right away.

Eric Paul Ziegler EDT 3010, Dr. Chung Monday, 30 August, 2010 Teacher Susan McCray Lights the Fire of Project Learning

The [|video] highlights English teacher Susan McCray’s Casco Bay High School “expeditionary learning” course. It does not matter that McCray’s idea originates out of students climbing the rigging of tall ships or backpacking in the mountains. She takes expeditions into an urban setting and focuses on relationships amongst students, to the outside world, and on “real people with real goals.” Her projects are relevant to the students’ daily lives. McCray makes the technology-resistent field of writing a technical exercise once again. Students do not simply turn in their projects but present them to in groups for critique and comment. They become “Skilled, knowledgeable, and capable.” I formerly believed that computers and the Internet distracted students from the essential skills of the humanities: Reading original texts, writing analyses, and oral presentations. McCray, however, makes technology essential to the storytelling experience: Digital photographs, PowerPoint slide shows, laptop computers to display the work. Students presenting in my old-fashioned style would render the subjects of their stories literally faceless, which has been one problem behind homelessness all along.

As described in the [|PowerPoint presentation], McCray successfully relocates control of the learning process. The project places responsibility for the production of knowledge with her students. In the scenes of her interaction with her students in the classroom, she becomes more of a coach or moderator than a lecturing teacher.

The students were more engaged than if they had not been using technical means to produce their stories. They take away skills that would be at home in such digital production facilities as a TV newsroom, online publication, or documentary film studio. [|Studs Terkel] would have used the very same approaches if he had been of this generation, and his book, [|Working], instead of being a text-based series of interviews, would have been a multimedia production. For my social studies classroom students will work with members of their communities to produce oral histories, recorded digitally, transcribed to text, and accompanied by video footage (current and historical), references to online government statistics and scholarly work in the field, and moderated by spoken and written student commentary. Primary documents from the relevant periods, once unavailable to high school students, are now [|online as scanned text or facsimiles of originals]. Images and recordings are available (how many students realize that we can actually hear [|the voice of Theodore Roosevelt]?) online. Movies are primary sources themselves when they tell us something about how people viewed the the events of their day ([|Triumph of The Will] or [|Birth of A Nation]).