For years now, teachers have heard the rumbling of the need to use and integrate technology into the classroom but many have been hesitant or even unwilling to try until now. The Covid-19 pandemic placed technology in the forefront of all educators forcing them to sink or swim in the new technological classroom settings. Questions that I heard from most teachers during workshops ranged from how would students use the technology to how can students be assessed and held accountable for work. The wide range of questions clearly showed that the hesitation in most teachers did not stem from an unwillingness but from a lack of understanding of how it would work and the uncertainty of whether or not they would be able to effectively use it. This crash course in technology due to the pandemic proved necessary and with proper planning as well as a collaborative approach proved to be successful to some degree.
Using my school as an example, we literally experienced a crash course but focused on small steps that we were able to build upon. We used basic ideas of how to use the technology in the classroom based on some ideas from teacherthought.com. Some of the ideas that we worked on were as follows: Creating online polls and quizzes, video conferencing, multimedia projects, using video content, and making it fun and letting students play (Blower, 2019). In order to cover these topics, we took advantage of the school closures on part time online teaching to address the teachers concerns and create workshops that would address these different ideas to be implemented.
Once brick and mortar schools closed and virtual learning was implemented, our teachers would submit and interact with students in the morning and then undergo collaborative training in the afternoon. Teachers were paired into groups that had a mixed level of technological experience ranging from novice to experienced. One of the first things we addressed was how to meet and interact with our students effectively. Using Google Suites, we ourselves integrated Google Meet as our form of meeting and interacting with the students while giving instruction. Meeting as a staff daily, in this manner, allowed for all the teachers to become familiar with the platform and made the transition to the classroom easier. The next area to tackle was how to assess and hold students accountable in the classroom. We continued using Google Suites by having teachers express their ideas on collaborative documents using Google Docs and Google Forms. Teachers would be asked to create and contribute to different documents regarding ideas on how to instruct students and what kind of assessments to use. They would also create and complete surveys on what they believed would be more effective and what their concerns were. Using Docs and Forms gave the teachers the comfort and experience to use them in the classroom. They were now able to create and administer assessments as well as create assignments for students to work on and submit. All of this could be used in conjunction with Google Classroom, where teachers would now be able to submit assignments, create due dates, and even grade the assignments as they were turned in. The digital classroom was becoming a reality in an extremely short period of time and teachers that would have never touched a computer in the classroom were now becoming dependent on them.
Some teachers were concerned about student social/emotional development while they were isolated in their homes. The collaborative forum we had implemented allowed us to brainstorm ideas of how to leave time in our digital classrooms for students to interact as well as collaborate themselves. Breakout sessions were added to class time allowing students to interact with each other and even play online games together, allowing them to be kids and have fun. Online educational games allowed for this but for the most part we allowed them to be kids and enjoy their time together online in short bursts.
This pandemic accelerated the need for technology in the classroom and forced teachers to face their fears and insecurities of how they could be effective in an environment they were not familiar with. Remember that teachers, in general, want to be good effective teachers and need to have their tools in order to do so. Most teachers are reluctant to use tools they are unfamiliar with but if the same tools are integrated by the administration in order to conduct faculty meetings and workshops, these teachers would feel more confident with the tools and be more likely to use them in the classroom.
Written by Danny Fernandez
Reference:
Blower, S. (2019, May 22). 6 Technology Integration Ideas For Any Content Area And Grade Level. TeachThought. https://www.teachthought.com/technology/6-technology-integration-ideas-content-area-grade-level/.