Help! I Need to Integrate Technology into my Teaching!!
Part of my duties as a faculty member is to teach ETC 447, Technology in the Classroom. This is a required course for all elementary and elementary/special education majors. Because this last semester a new format of the class was going to be tested where students needed to spend 10 hrs. in a regular classroom or computer lab in an elementary school, I decided to change the curriculum of the course to Problem-based Learning (PBL). The main reason of my decision was that PBL promotes learning through inquiry. So, the result is a PBL that is geared toward preservice teachers and which places them in a scenario where they need to prepare for their first professional teaching experience.
Given that the students were asked to spend 10 hrs. in the elementary schools and they were going to support teachers and students in technology integration, it was very likely that they would face situations that were unfamiliar to them. I decided that using a PBL to teach them technology integration would resemble more the unfamiliar situations they might encounter during their 10 hrs. of field experience. After finishing the semester of the PBL implementation, I noticed that students did not complain much about “I don’t know what to do in the classroom” or “I do not know how to do this or that” since the computer classes at the university were mainly discovery-based where the students learned almost on their own their way around in the software programs.
During the first time of the PBL implementation, I kept a journal on the obstacles or challenges I found while implementing the new curriculum. For instance, one of the unexpected situations that I encountered was that not all the students had already completed their philosophy of education, a document that was required to embark in the PBL curriculum. As a result, I added some specific links and a research activity to help the instructor implement the curriculum with less hurdles. Another missing part was a lesson plan template and a lesson plan rubric. Although I used them during the first implementation, they were not part of the PBL web pages, situation that I have corrected.
In terms of assessment, there was one important piece of philosophy writing that was not being peer reviewed. After implementing the curriculum, I decided to make it peer reviewed to increase the chances that students will reflect on their own beliefs.
Finally, I want to add that I created a Teacher’s Notes page where the instructor can find step-by-step instructions on how to implement the PBL and the rationale for the activities presented in the same. This page is not linked to any page, though, since it is the only one that is directed specifically to the instructor. I hope that you can add a link to the page from the introductory page to this problem when you publish it on the web. From my point of view, the PBL curriculum is complete and ready to be implemented again.