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What do standards and productivity tools have to do with each other?

Last week at broadcast Kauai shared a presentation that focused on using the Internet and we finished broadcast with a presentation of how some DOE teachers have used productivity tools to address the educational technology standards. You also had the chance to practice using spreadsheet. This is a tool that can be used for simple calculations and recordkeeping, but it also can be a useful tool to help your students develop some higher level thinking skills.

How can productivity tools be used to help students think critically?

The CEO forum report that you've been working with has identified a set of 21st century skills that our students should have. These include:

1. Improved digital age literacy skills (e.g. technological, cultural, global awareness)
2. Improved inventive thinking skills (e.g. creativity, problem solving, higher order, sound reasoning)
3. Improved effective communication and interpersonal skills (e.g. writing, public speaking, teamwork, collaboration)
4. Improved productivity skills (e.g. create high quality products)

The NETS for Students (and Teachers) as well as the HCPSII Content and Performance Standards for Educational Technology address the standard of using Productivity Tools. When you look at the standards for students, it is very clear that we are expected to do more than just teach our students the basic skills of operating productivity tools. We are expected to create learning opportunities where our students use these tools for learning and higher level thinking and creativity.

Take some time to visit the T3 Resources (the link is in the navigation button on the left side of this page) and look under What's New and choose from the links there to read about Bloom's Taxonomy and think about how you can use productivity tools to support the development of 21st century skills as well as to provide learning opportunities at the upper end of Bloom's Taxonomy.

You have just had the opportunity to work as a site to identify how various technology tools can be used as teaching tools and as learning tools. What is the difference between a teaching tool and a learning tool? While we are compiling the data that you submitted last week, take some time to look at some other suggestions and rationale for using various technology tools as teaching and learning tools. This is a document that Don Zundel, from Apple, thought you might enjoy. Use this as a starting point for your own ideas of how to use technology.

Technology Teaching and Learning Tools

This week you're going to be working with Database and from the poll that you took a couple weeks ago, this seems to be the application that you have the least experience with (as a group).

Once you finish your work with Database, begin thinking about how you would use the integrative features of word processing, graphics, spreadsheet and database to support what you're doing in the classroom. How are you using these applications as teaching tools? How are you using them as learning tools? How are you using them for your own personal and professional productivity?

For your Learning Results Portfolios, you will need to show documentation of how you're using productivity tools. This needs to go beyond the assignments that you've done so far for T3 and reflect how you're implementing what you've learned into your work with students, peers, parents, other school members or whoever you work with in the course of a day.

Go to the Learning Results Portfolio description and carefully read the description of the portfolio and what you'll be expected to place in your portfolio.

For now, all you need to be doing to prepare for the creation of your portfolio is:

1. gathering examples that you want to include in the portfolio.
2. begin thinking about captions (tell what the example is) and reflections (think about how it represents growth or change)
3. organizing these examples into your T3 Homework folder. You might want to create a new folder called Portfolio and begin storing your documents in this folder.
4. If you have hard copies of your work, go ahead and put them in a file folder.

Once we begin working with Multimedia and Web Design you'll be learning ways to prepare your documents and projects to be viewed on the web. In the Tips section of the Learning Results Portfolio page, we've included tips for taking screen shots.

In your Reflective Journal for this month, you can count any time that you spend organizing your files in preparation for creating a portfolio under the Portfolio hours.