Final Project: Technology Integration Matrix

Introduction to The Outsiders

For this project, I used a lesson plan that I created this semester in my Methods class. It is an introduction to the novel, The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. I started by thinking about what the overall goal of my lesson was. The lesson uses pre-reading activities to get the students thinking about the themes of the novel and how those themes are relevant to their own lives. As such, the goal I came up with was to increase student understanding of the themes in The Outsiders and activate prior knowledge about those ideas before reading to make connections to the text.

Next, I looked at the content standards for English Language Arts in 8^th grade. First, I picked standards that I felt directly supported my goal: SL.8.1 and RL.8.2. Then, I made a list of all the teaching strategies I wanted to use for the lesson. I filled in the strategies that corresponded to each standard. After I did that, I still had a few strategies remaining so I filled in the standards that supported them: W.8.4 and W.8.6. Now that my first two columns were filled in, I moved on to the technology column. I looked at the teaching strategies in each row and, using the spreadsheet from Interactivity #3, I chose the technologies that I felt best supported each strategy in meeting the standard it corresponded to.

Once I worked out which technologies I wanted to use, I added another column on the left side of my spreadsheet under standards. I looked at the NET-S to fill in the standards my lesson was already indirectly supporting in addition to the content area standards. At the end of this long process, I found that all of my rows really seemed to add up. The spreadsheet is arranged chronologically in order of strategies used during the lesson.

In the first row, I have the students engaging in collaborative discussions – first with a partner, then in a small group, and then with the whole class - about stereotyping. The students are actually engaging in an activity that demonstrates how easy it is for us to stereotype others by making judgments about people in photos. I decided to use a SMART board to support the Partner Work the students do first. They will look at the pictures on the SMART board and list the characteristics they come up with for each picture directly on the board. We would refer to the work done on the smart board throughout the rest of the discussions listed in the first row.

In the second row, the students are learning about the themes and central ideas of the text, which they would already be thinking about from the activities in the first row. The students would discuss what it means to be an outsider, which would lead into a discussion of how people become outsiders and what they do to avoid that label. Each group would get a situation from the novel that exemplifies the theme of forming identity as a member of a group, bullying/violence, being stereotyped because of the groups one belongs to, or submitting to peer pressure situations to avoid being labeled as an outsider. They would have to figure out the theme, explain how it is relevant to them, and provide a real-world example of how it is relevant to them. Then, they would compile these findings as a class in a GoogleDoc spreadsheet, which would be assessed for accuracy and thoroughness.

In the third row, students will be asked to free write for 5 minutes about a time when they felt like an outsider and how it made them feel. They will also write about what can be done to help people who are considered outsiders. This would be assessed informally as the first draft in a writing assignment. They would upload the document to GoogleDocs and peer-edit each others’ writing in pairs. I would assess their peer-editing by the thoroughness, accuracy, and validity of their contributions.

In the last row, I have the students publish the final draft of their writing in a short blog post. The final draft will be assessed using a rubric to evaluate usage, organization, clarity, and requirements met. While I had some technology in lesson before this project, it looks and feels more authentic now. By infusing the lesson with technology, I was able to add a dimension that it was lacking before. 

The Role of Social Media in Schools

This week at my fieldwork site, the students were given some free time on the laptops in the classroom. A few of them were listening to music online. My cooperating teacher commented on the fact that they always find ways around the blocked sites. This reminded me of how students at my own high school used web-based proxies to access sites such as Facebook, Myspace, and YouTube. Although most schools try to block social media websites on school servers, there is no denying that the students frequent these sites and use them to connect with each other.

According to this article, Rhode Island recently passed an anti-bullying measure that, among other things, bans all social media websites on school grounds. The bill does not specify what a social media website is, thus leaving it up to schools to decide. This can be risky because it allows for the censorship and, ultimately, abuse by administration when interpreting the law. Not to mention - as the article does - that social media sites are not inherently any more dangerous than other sites, and that students will still have access to these sites on school grounds with their cell phones. Rather than allow the students to access risky sites under the supervision of teachers and administrators; rather than creating teachable moments where students could learn about cyber-bullying and social media sites, the schools prefer to avoid the topic altogether and ban the sites. The best part is that this doesn't change things for students, who can just access those sites at home or on their phones. As teachers, it is our job to show students how to use this technology in safe and healthy ways. Unfortunately, most of us won't be given that chance.