ISTE Standard 3
How can my interactions with students and their parents/guardians be digitally innovative to facilitate student growth and parental involvement in education?
In doing research for this question I came across this site called Schoology. According to Schoology, they offer software that allows teachers to streamline all of their task into one program. Teachers can post content, lessons, quizzes and test, assign homework, run chat rooms, track data, and also run a professional learning community with colleagues, all from within this software. A selling point is that this will integrate a lot of our task and allow us more time to teach. Parental/guardian involvement could also be increased by assigning students content related topics to discuss at home and allowing students and families’ access to what is going on in class.
In our weekly vialogues meeting, our instructor introduced us to Cellly. Celly would be a great tool to increase parental involvement. I like the thought of using Celly because it provides access to anyone who has any type of cell phone. Messages could be sent out informing parents about how the class day went, what type of topics were covered, or ideas to continue the learning at home with conversation starters. Messages about homework to be done or test that need to be studied for could also be included. My intention with using Celly, wouldn’t be to create helicopter parents/guardians, but to provide families with options for increasing dialogue around school content, resulting in increased levels of interest and learning.
From our readings for the ISTE 3 standard, we learned from the Kennedy article that it will be essential that teachers become competent using internet based learning systems. The article discusses on-line learning and blended type of learning environments as becoming more of the norm in the future. If this is the case, educators will need to be prepared to adapt. As an educator I will remain open and embrace the opportunity to learn new technologies as they become available. I will have to be able to teach myself how to use the multitude of tools that can enhance learning. Smart boards are becoming common features in classrooms. My classmate Katie Young, is interested in learning how to use Smart boards effectively. I too need to increase my knowledge base around using smart boards in ways that increase student engagement.
References and Links
https://www.schoology.com/home.php
http://smarttech.com/Home+Page/Solutions/K-12
Kennedy, K. (2011). Cross-reference of online teaching standards and the development of quality teachers for 21st century learning environments. Distance Learning, 7(2), 21-28.
Developing Competency in Teaching 