I am teaching a well-regarded and well- designed course with a long-standing legacy and am one of a cohort of six teachers who teach this course to the entire 11th grade.
It is good.
Yet as an ed-tech specialist, I am finding it very difficult to meaningfully integrate technology. There are several reasons for this.... at least I think so.
1) The relentless pace.
2) Coverage of content.
3) The type of content.
4) I've never taught the class before.
We are proud that we teach kids to actively make meaning. As a history teacher, I sometimes wish we gave more context so that the kids could more easily make meaning out of these remote texts. But I read Bruce Lesh and other thought leaders in the teaching of history, and clearly this course does a lot of what they suggest.
Perhaps I should leave good enough alone. After all, I do have my students blog. That's tech, right? But I've made a big push for multimodal publishing in the classroom and a month in, my students have done very little. We haven't made videos or sparkpages or infographics or anything like that.
I'll need to be more intentional about incorporating tech to enhance learning. After all, if the technology integration specialist isn't doing it, who will?
I'm reminded that teaching is hard, that incorporating new things is hard. I'm also increasingly aware that it is easier to add technology to a new course than retrofit tech to an old one.
Readers, I'm glad for any advice.
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