Technology Considerations - what to look for and think about

In an earlier post, I outlined several best practices to keep in mind when using technology in the classroom. I believe that those general guidelines can help teachers to be more effective in their integration efforts. Here, I've identified a few things that teachers might take into consideration when looking at specific technology applications. It is by no means a complete list, but can give a good start to your deliberations!

• What is the “flash” factor? Some applications present an exciting first impression but don’t have a lot of substance behind them. It is important to think about the meaningful applications of the technology you are considering. Don’t simply be awed by the attractive visuals – determine the communication standards that you expect your students to attain and think about how the specific technology can support it. Ask yourself: does the technology make the communication easier or does it simply make a “prettier” final product? Keep in mind, though, that some “flash” is good as a motivator for getting kids to become engaged with the technology!
• What is the age and ability appropriateness? When you examine a technology application, think about how your students will use it. Are there any prerequisite skills that they need to have (such as typing fluency, spelling, web use, etc.)? How easy is it to use the application? There are many excellent applications for young students that are intuitive and use minimal buttons or controls. Likewise, many more powerful technology tools require students to have had a certain level of prior experience with software use and are more appropriately presented to older learners. When you plan an activity that requires students to use a specific technology, you should also plan to take time for students to become familiar with the tools. More complex software will generally take students longer to learn.
  
• Who will/can see the student work? Does the specific technology provide privacy controls? Privacy of student work is very important, especially in the elementary classroom setting. You should be aware of issues with parental permission and consider how the given technology allows you to control who sees the work. Additionally, you should think about who the technology allows your students to communicate with. Think “outside of the box” when considering ways to have your students communicate. You may find your students blogging with their favorite children’s book author or having a conversation with students in another country using video chat or voice-over-Internet applications.
  
• How is the specific technology accessed? You will need to think about the ways that your students will connect and use the technology. Is it a software application that needs to be installed on computers the students will use? Is is web-based, requiring Internet access? Can more than one student use it at the same time? These logistical considerations will impact the ways that you utilize different technologies and may make some technologies more attractive to your particular situation.
  

Using Music and Sound Effects in Class Projects

On Monday, I wrote about finding royalty- and copyright-free images to use in creating multimedia projects. I neglected, however to add resources for music and sound effects. There are several resources that you and your students can use to add sound to your podcasts or multimedia projects without risking copyright violations. 

Unlike images, recordings of music are not in the public domain. Sheet music or lyrics with a copyright of 1922 or earlier can be used (changes in copyright law mean that no additional music will enter the public domain until 2019). You or your students just have to make the recording. It could be a great project for you to coordinate with a music teacher!

When I record my class' podcast, I use Apple's Garage Band software. This application comes with a large library of sound effects and music loops that are copyright-free. There are lots of options to choose from (and my students love adding effects like crowds cheering, etc.).

There are several websites that offer royalty-free music for download. Look carefully, though, to see if you need to purchase the tracks - it can get expensive! A few sources of free music are:

• RoyaltyFreeMusic.com has a program to provide access to free music for schools, students, and educators. They have some requirements for application, so read the details to see if your school qualifies.
• incompetech.com has a large library of music by composer Kevin MacLeod. The music is organized genre and mood. This music is licensed under Creative Commons. He suggests a donation to offset his costs, but doesn't require it. He does request that you credit him for the music that you use.
• PartnersinRhyme.com offers a large selection of royalty-free music for download or purchase. They offer several music and sound effects tracks for free for you to use in your projects.

One excellent (and creative) way to avoid issues of copyright is to have your students create the music that they use in their productions. This, of course, is more time consuming, but it offers the opportunity for students to have even greater ownership of the final product. Talk with your music teacher for ideas about how the students could become the composers!

Finally, Creative Commons has produced a Podcasting Legal Guide that includes a lot of information on copyright and other issues in producing podcasts.

Using Copyright- and Royalty-Free Media

It is important to teach students that, although images and information are readily available on-line, much of it is protected by copyright. When completing class projects, it can be tempting for students (and, I'll admit, teachers) to simply conduct a Google image search and grab the first picture that fits the need. Unfortunately, this can cause problems due to copyright law, especially if finished projects will be available for public viewing. If you have questions about copyright and fair use, your school library/media specialist should be able to help you.

The images that students collect and use for their work should be copyright- or royalty-free (you can also teach them about how to obtain permission to use images if they find one they really want to use). A search on-line for copyright free images can get you many possibilities. Be aware, though, that many (or most) of these sites do not contain filtered content and may include images that are not appropriate for children. You must examine the sites yourself before linking your students to them.

Here are a few places to find images to use (be sure to check the sites prior to your lesson to make sure that they are still operable):

• US Government works are automatically considered part of the public domain. Excellent images can be found from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, NASA, US Department of Agriculture, US Department of the Interior, and more. Check the individual websites for these services to explore their image libraries.

• www.Pics4Learning.com is a library of images that have been donated for use in educational projects. Permission has been given for teachers and students to use all of the images in the collection.
  

• Wikimedia Commons has a huge library of images, video, and audio files, that are in the public domain or are freely licensed. When selecting a photo, you can see the licensing information for that image.

• www.PDPhoto.org provides thousands of pictures that have been placed in the public domain by the photographer, Jon Sullivan.

You should identify quality sources of images for your students and provide them with links to those sites that you want them to visit. As always - quality advance work yields better results!

Elementary Podcasting

For the past year and a half, I have had my students produce a weekly podcast in which they share the news of their week at school. Two students each week are selected to write and revise their script, summarizing highlights of the week, main ideas learned, planning interviews with faculty, and more. One of the kids' favorite segments seems to be visiting their younger siblings and talking about what they are doing in the lower grades. It has been an engaging and exciting activity, with some excellent opportunities for students to develop their expressive communication skills through writing and speaking.

A podcast, in its basic form, is like a radio show for the Internet. The name comes from the words iPod and broadcast, though iPods are not needed in the process. What is needed are a digital audio recorder (the built-in microphones on most newer computers are pretty good for basic recording) and web space to host the audio file. That's about it to get started - on the technical side. Having something to say and a reason to say it is especially important, too! There are many ways that students and teachers could use podcasting: reporting news, reading works they have written, sharing research results or opinion pieces, interviewing community members, and more. I'd love to hear other suggested purposes.

There are a lot of great examples of podcasting in the elementary classroom (besides my class, of course!). One podcast that is often cited as an exemplar is Radio Willow Web from Omaha Nebraska. The students at the school from all grade levels take their turn at sharing a topic they have learned. Their teacher, Tony Vincent, has put together some amazing resources at www.learninginhand.com. An extensive list of education-related podcasts can also be found at The Education Podcast Network. 

Like any good education experience, when it comes to podcasting with your students, you need to plan carefully to be effective. In working on the print version of my Independent Learning Project for my master's degree, I have been developing an integration plan for creating a weekly news podcast. Here are some of the key points.

Learning Objectives:

The students will...

• work collaboratively to develop a script.
  
• revise their scripts, taking into consideration organization, audience, and detail.
  
• accurately describe and discuss the week's content learning and class activities.
  
• speak clearly, with appropriate volume, diction, and pacing when recording.
  
• use recording software to edit their recording and prepare a final product (optional extension activity)
  

Creating a class podcast is , by definition, and on-going activity and is not completed with a single lesson. Instead, the project should develop and grow with the students' development of their skills. The best advice that I was given when starting my podcast project was to start small. Keep the scope of your podcast manageable and plan ahead for making it a success. If you take time with your students to create a clear plan and goal for podcasting, your end result will be that much more successful. As you and your students get used to the process and potential of podcasting, you will find new ideas to add to the quality of the finished product.

There are several topics and mini-lessons that should be covered with your students in developing their podcast. Some of these are:

• understanding what podcasts are
• brainstorming and planning ideas for a class podcast
• summarizing what has been learned in class
• writing a script
• developing an interesting lead and conclusion
• reviewing the script and making revisions
• understanding copyright and fair use policy
• speaking clearly and articulately
• planning and conducting interviews
• using software to edit and produce a recording

In future blog postings on this topic, I plan to include graphic organizers and an assessment rubric that can be helpful for planning and assessing student podcasts.

Some "best practices" and other considerations

I have been thinking about what guidelines ought to be considered when an elementary school teacher decides that he or she wishes to bring more technology into the classroom. It's a bit of a daunting task! The topic is broad - really integrating technology means changing some of the fundamentals of the classroom. It means adjusting the roles and relationships of the teacher and student. It means moving away from traditional assessment measures and towards performance- and project-based assessment. The promise of technology in the classroom is to enhance students' opportunities for problem solving, communication, and application of their learning in authentic ways.

Technology is already integrated into most students' (and teachers') daily lives. We use email and text. We quickly look up answers to questions we encounter. Banking, calendars, shopping, entertainment and other daily activities have moved on-line. We can even get the groceries by sitting in front of the computer! All too often, though, when students enter the classroom, their technology rich lives are left outside the door.

The Center for Applied Research in Educational Technology (CARET) is a project of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). On their home page, they say that, "CARET bridges education technology research to practice by offering research-based answers to critical questions." For the question, "How can technology be infused into curriculum and instruction effectively?" they offer four answers from the research. They determined that educators and decision makers should: review the content of technology applications to see that it aligns with content standards; enable students to develop proficiency with technology tools prior to content instruction; intentionally develop lessons and units utilizing technology to support content standards; and know how to use the selected technology and any additional resources or equipment required.

Edutopia, from the George Lucas Educational Foundation, has some amazing and exciting suggestions for ways to integrate technology. In one article on their site, the Edutopia staff identify four essential goals that effective technology integration can support: "active engagement of students, participation in groups, frequent interaction and feedback, and connection to real-world experts." They emphasize, too, that technology integration should be a seamless part of the environment and support curricular goals.

The research I have done for my Independent Learning Project (as well as hands-on experience with technology in my own classroom) has led me to the following considerations for effectively using technology to support students' expressive communication:

• The learning goals and content outcomes must be identified by the teacher before technology considerations can be made. Educators must think about what they want the students to learn and only then should they select the appropriate technology.
• Be aware of what the final product will be in order to plan the steps needed for completion. You can't answer students' questions on a project if you don't know where it should be headed.
• Think about who will receive your communication. Who is the audience for this activity? How do you want them to find and interact with the information? What is the content that your students are communicating. Consider privacy implications if your plan is to publish students' work. These first three points are closely related and align with good teaching practices generally: know what you want to accomplish and then make a plan for how to get there.
• Try out the technology yourself first. Whether you are creating a podcast, making a movie, or using a spreadsheet to show class data, you need to know how the hardware and software works. It's embarrassing (not to mention unprofessional) to be stuck in front of the students not knowing how to make the application work. Glitches will happen, but some practice with the technology will help you to anticipate them and know what to do. Technology's not perfect, so you should have a backup plan in case something's not working at the moment you want it!
• Plan to use technology in a  constructivist manner. Wenglinsky (2005) analyzed performance data from the NAEP and found that teaching practices that emphasize higher-order thinking, problem solving, and development of meaning correspond to better performance on assessments. Interestingly, he found that didactic uses of technology (rote skill-and-drill types of work) had either no effect or a negative effect on performance.
• Plan for differentiation of instruction. Consider the ways that the selected technology can support struggling students and provide additional enrichment for advanced learners. 
• Be creative! When you encounter or are told about a new technology, make a mental note of it. Try it out to see if it might have an application for your classroom. Don't force a lesson onto the technology (see bullet point #1) but keep the tool in mind for possible applications. Adding a new twist to some old lessons can bring them to life again and can make teaching and learning fun!

OK, I know that's probably WAY too much to put into one posting. I apologize for that! I encourage you to add considerations that teachers should make when integrating technology into the classroom. As always, these tips are just a starting off point!

Sifting through the Curriculum Frameworks

In starting to consider ways of integrating technology to support expressive communication in the elementary classroom, I dove (OK, waded) in to the Massachusetts English Language Arts Curriculum Frameworks. The Frameworks, which outline the skills that students in Massachusetts schools should learn, are organized into four main strands: Language, Reading and Literature, Composition, and Media. Within these strands are 27 General Standards (broad ideas) which are further subdivided into 337 Learning Standards.

I chose to limit my reading of the Frameworks to those learning goals targeted to grades 6 and younger, which brought the total number of Learning Standards to 191 - still a lot, but a bit more manageable! From here, I narrowed my focus to those goals that related to students' expressive communication skills: speaking, writing, and visual presentation. I tried to be somewhat liberal in deciding which standards applied. Even some seemingly receptive skills such as reading included expressive components, such as identifying or analyzing text elements. 

To get a glimpse of those standards, I decided to run it through the website wordle.net. This is a really cool and simple way to get a visual representation of text. It creates a "cloud" of all of the words in a selected passage (omitting commonly used words like the or a). The more frequently a word appears in the passage, the larger it is in the cloud. Here is the cloud that I created using my selected learning standards:

The most commonly appearing verbs here are use (which I combined with the word using, resulting in a larger sample), identify, write, and analyze. Other terms that stand out are text, language, information, and ideas. At a quick glance, it seems like application and critical thinking are pretty important components of the expressive communication standards. 

Obviously, English Language Arts standards aren't the only place that contain expressive communication components, but I felt that it was a logical starting off point. Other content areas provide wonderful applications of these skills, and can utilize technology to enhance that communication throughout the classroom.