It has been a very busy year… as it is every year. The pandemic however has made 2020 stand out from among the rest as unique. Had you told me two years ago that I would be teaching from home I would’ve laughed at you.
Had you told me two years ago that I would be advocating for a simpler curriculum and for the banning of field trips/excursions I would have laughed at you. Had you told me two years ago that technology would be so far down my list of priorities that I barely gave it a thought, I would’ve laughed at you. However this is where we find ourselves and now at the end of the year, when I have had time to reflect, I want to articulate my thoughts on the future of technology in my classroom and why I strive to have pedagogy as the foundation of every decision I made.
As I have already briefly blogged about, I had the honour of attending an amazing workshop this year about concept-based inquiry. This course and the rewriting, in one way or another, of each of our IPC units has taken up the majority of my thinking. The questions I have been asking myself include;
- how do I support my students in their thinking?
- how do I create a physical and intellectual environment in my classroom where students are doing the heavy thinking?
- How do I support students to organise their thoughts into schemas of understanding?
- How do I support students to articulate that understanding as generalisations?
- And how do I support students to transfer these generalisations to similar and dissimilar contexts?
Even though I love technology, authentic meaningful technology integration must be built on a foundation of sound pedagogy.
What needs to happen? Let’s see…
- Identify conceptual understanding for all units – IPC, language arts, and mathematics.
- Formulate generalisations with these concepts in relationship
- Find and agree on practical and effective strategies and tools, to assess knowledge, skills, and understanding.
This is the base, the cornerstone of a dynamic pedagogically rich map for learning. I think it might take two years but our Year 3 team is pretty fabulous (despite our 2nd lockdown, we are still progressing well.)
The use of technology in all its forms naturally supports differentiation and institutionalises student agency. In the next post, I want to outline a plan: how I might use technology in the future, building on a sound pedagogical foundation, and fostering student agency.
