Reflection 5

With so many different technologies available to teachers in their classrooms, learning how to evaluate their usefulness is extremely important. From my personal experience, I can remember very clearly my elementary school teachers wheeling in the big TV’s so we could watch movies. Sure, they may have been educational, but did they enhance our learning? I’m not sure, maybe they did? A great way to assess the usefulness or effectiveness of a technology being used for educational purposes is the SAMR model. The 4 parts to the SAMR model are: Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition. Using this model, educators can better understand what kind of an impact the technology is having on their learners and whether it is adding to their educational experience or not.

Let’s take an Ipad for example. You can make notes on an Ipad then post it online for your students to see. Well, you can do the same thing with a pen a paper — just take a picture of a drawing and upload it (there is an example of this in the above image I created for the process of making sourdough bread). In this instance the Ipad is merely a substituion for a pen a paper. If you were to use the Ipad to create an animation however, you would be moving into the territory of Redefinition whereby the technology is being used to create something completely new. When technology is used in the classroom like this, students have the chance to really take ownershipo of what they do and mark it with their own creative flare.

In my own practice, I will keep this model in mind to make sure the technology I’m using in class is actually offering something to my students. Sure, sometimes it can be nice to have some form of novelty in the classroom to shake up the routine and add a little spice, but the real challenge is making sure that the novelty is more than just that.