Guidelines for Using Instructional Technology Well

This week's activities must be completed by Monday, January 26, 2009.

This Week's Activities

The purpose for this week's activities is to help you think critically about what makes a technology effective for education and to recognize times appropriate and inappropriate uses of technology.  To fully participate in this week's activities, you must do the following.  You should expect to spend about 1 hour completing this week's assignments.

• Comment on this week's Gospel Insights Presentation.  Think about the message as well as the presentation of the message.  What have you learned from their presentation?  How will you apply their message in your life?  What suggestions can you offer the author for making the presentation more effective?  What ideas does their presentation give you for future presentations that you may make?
• View the following presentation to the principles of effective technology integration and review the NETS standards.  I also recommend reading about TPACK.
• Principles of Effective Technology Integration

• Visit the Teaching with Technology Showcase and examine each of the examples of teacing with technology.  Keep in mind the "Guidelines for using Technology Well" that I presented above.  Take notes so that you can answer the questions below. (30 minutes)
  • Which uses of technology were most effective?  Why?
  • Which uses of technology were least effective? Why?
  • Which uses of technology were most appropriate for teaching your content area? Why?
• Particpate in the class discussion about "The Effective Use of Technology in Teaching". This discussion will take place on the CTL video blog.  The recordings for the CTL video blog are saved off-site and sometimes the hosting site does not function properly.  I strongly recommend that you record a brief test message on your personal blog before recording a full comment on the class blog.  If the video records, go ahead and record on the group blog.  If not, email me and let me know that the tool is down.  I will evaluate your participation based on this rubric. (30 minutes)