Cited Toolkit Experience
I created this
with my target audience in mind. If this
class has taught me one thing it is to always consider your target audience
when you are putting something together.
One of my colleagues doesn’t use technology in her lessons, but I think
she doesn’t have too many ideas about how to infuse it into her lessons. Most of what was helpful about this site was
that there were a lot of options about how to utilize technology in the
classroom, how technology impacts learning and what the 21st century
students need to know. I would like to
see more articles about why teachers should use technology correlating directly
with the CCS. A lot of teachers seem to
think that this new style of learning isn’t really helping the kids. At the same time I stayed away from links
that just offered pages with a lot of other links because that can be
overwhelming.
The teachers that
I sent the links to are different. Some
embrace technology and some don’t. I
think both of them are highly motivated to teach the children understand the
content better. They are also people who
love to learn and constantly challenge themselves to do better. Having a toolkit allows information to be
stored in one place for viewing and can easily be shared. I only wish that other articles that I have
read could be stored on there. I wanted
to add the article that I found during my MMP research. It was about 21st century learning
standards and the ever changing idea of what is considered literate in today’s
society.
Of course, some
people said that I should add more information to the toolkit, but they liked
the articles that I had available. My
rationale for keeping it small was that I didn’t want to overwhelm anyone, but
just inform them in small doses. Just
like websites, forms or any visual presentations that aren’t spaced nicely and
visually appealing, I didn’t want this toolkit to just bunch a variety of
information from various sources.
Someone else told me that if I’m trying to make an argument for
implementing technology, I should also look for articles about schools that
aren’t solely implementing technology as a means of teaching and how it is
working out. Some teachers think that we
need to get back to the basics and teach the skills instead of trying to teach
them how to use the technology so I should address this.
Jennifer,
ReplyDeleteI found CITEd really useful, too, and I'm glad to see others feel the same! It sounds like your colleagues had a lot of good feedback and suggestions, which is great. I agree that it's better not to overwhelm people with too many links (I think my kit has too many links, haha) and to really aim for your target audience. You raise a good point about looking for articles that don't press for 100% technology implementation but are taking it more slowly in their schools, but unfortunately there isn't a category for that on the site. I agree that being able to add articles from off CITEd into your own kit would be a nice feature, and that made me think of the option to reorganize links - it seems as though they're all sorted alphabetically by default in the kits, but I know that at least in mine I had a few links that would make more logical sense if they were in a sequence based on content. I guess you could make more than one kit, but that would get back to the overwhelming problem.
Good ideas!