Technology Integration Plan (Final Draft) - McDowell

Revision: In order to unfold this technology integration another layer we will eventually turn their blogs into an assessment. The assessment will be similar to our Expert Analysis Tour learning challeng

This plan was created to solve the problem of keeping students engaged in class content after daily learning activities have been completed in an Accounting class. In order to solve this problem I decided to use the TIP model to integrate new technology into my Accounting class for the students to use self choice and conduct research on current events in the world of business. They will be posting articles on shared spaces on wakelet that they found interesting and also include a summary of the article and 1 discussion prompt from the article for the class. Periodically throughout the semester (every Friday, or every other Friday) we will spend a day in class to have the discussions that the students prompted and stay up to date on current events in business. In order to take the integration of technology even a step further I decided to add a blog on weebly that the students will update periodically throughout the semester. I considered having them use FlipGrids as was suggested for this, but I wanted to give the students an opportunity to learn some basic web design. Their blog will be on the students updating what they found interesting from the wakelet articles and classroom discussions, or if they want to further develop thoughts from the discussions or even update the stories that were previously discussed.

During this course I learned that technology should not be the focus of the lesson, but rather used as a way to support the students understanding of the learning standards. It is also important to identify the affordances and constraints of new technology and self reflect on the appropriate use of the technology as it relates to increasing student engagement or understanding of the learning standards.

For this project I pulled from the texts analyzing the affordances and constraints of technology tools and the 3 phases of the TIP approach to analyze my use of technology so that it can be of best use for the students. The affordances of these 2 technology tools are that the students can interact with one another and easily access what their peers are finding interesting by accessing their peers weebly page or our classes wakelet page. Another affordance is that the students can work on this on their own time, so it will be a self paces learning activity that technology will allow them to do! A constraint of these tools is that since it is visible to their peers, the students could potentially engage in group think on a topic before our class has had the opportunity to fully discuss and engage in what they have found. This could limit the students ability to think on their own and form their own unique thoughts.

Something else that I was able to grab from previous lessons was the importance of hands on learning from the 4th learning challenge. With this integration of technology, the students are able to research their own inquiries and then apply what they learned. They are applying what they learned by creating a blog post on a website. The students will be challenged to form their own thoughts on the article or current events and formulate a blog post sharing what they learned. It was also beneficial for me to be able to use what I learned from the Problems of Practice learning challenge and then unfold it to more levels to better attack that problem.