Dennis Harper is in Iowa this week doing two spotlight sessions at the Iowa Technology and Education Conference (ITEC). He called in this morning with a terrific report about the first session, where he shared the stage with students from Nevada, Iowa, who are doing the TechYES technology literacy certification program to meet the 8th grade tech literacy standards.
Also in audience, Scott McLeod of the Dangerously Irrelevant blog, who quoted Dennis as saying, “You can’t expect responsible kids if you don’t give them any responsibility.” Very true!
They used our Sharing Student Voice: Students Presenting at Conferences whitepaper (free PDF download) to prepare the students, and the students shared the projects they did to satisfy national technology literacy standards. Each student did two projects, one to satisfy a social studies class assignment, and the other of their own choice. Of course they all chose to show their personal project! There should be video coming soon.
Scott also asks, “How’s your state / district doing with that NCLB requirement that all 8th graders be technology literate by December 2006?” One of the reasons we designed the TechYES program to be flexible and project-based is that states and districts are approaching this question in very different ways. By creating a way for schools to assess technology literacy in the context of other core class assignments while meeting local standards, it means that students aren’t doing busywork or taking multiple choice tests to show technology literacy.
Today Dennis is repeating his session with a different group of students. I’m sure they will continue to show that students can be responsible learners when given the opportunity. We’ll share more when we get the photos and projects!
Sylvia
Sylvia, it was a real pleasure to meet Dennis in person after following his (and your) work for years. He’s a captivating personality. I totally forgot to mention that you and I had connected via Skype earlier this year. Sorry!
PREFACE: This is a post for a graduate course in instructional technology at Illinois State University – thanks for reading!
Title: Technology Literacy Assessment
During this summer I’m choosing to focus on technology literacy assessment. I have an interest in this topic for two reasons; one, I teach an instructional technology course to pre-service students and two, I work with community college students who need to possess technology literacy skills to be successful in their college courses. The blog entry I reference for this post comes from the author Sylvia and is on the topic of “Generation YES”: http://blog.genyes.com/index.php/2007/10/09/iowa-technology-conference-students-present-tech-literacy-projects/
Posted in October of 2007 this describes a program for Nevada and Iowa eigth graders who are engaged in “TechYes” a technology literacy certification program. In this project, aligned with ISTE standards, students create projects that demonstrate their technology skills. The program aims to address the NCLB eighth grade technology literacy requirement. The TechYES website offers integration ideas and implementation kits.
I guess I have a third concern and interest in this topic as a faculty development professional. I have been teaching instructional technology to practicing and pre-service teachers for 8 years. I haven’t seen, however, significant gains in the way practicing teachers integrate technology into their teaching. I think technology integration is easily done for some teachers and a real fear for others. I have no specific research on this but I suspect we are making larger gains in using technology as a tool for professional productivity as compared to the progress we’re making in true instructional technology integration into teaching and learning. By professional productivity I mean the increasing use of the web to search for resources, email for communication, grade book software for progress tracking and maybe even web editing tools and course management systems for putting instructional materials online. I teach only one class per term but I can see how we might not be making significant progress in mainstream technology integration simply because of the time required. Teachers are faced with more “daily” task and challenges that taking on additional challenges through learning new tools seems impossible. I think it’s great when school districts make intentional efforts to integrate professional development into in-services and planned training, allow teachers to attend conferences and encourage teachers to take continuing education classes. But without these intentional efforts focused on technology integration it may be nearly impossible to expect eighth grade students to meet or exceed the technology literacy requirements of NCLB. This certainly won’t come without the time and dedication of trained teachers. A program like TechYES might be a very reasonable solution for districts and teachers.