Technology Interactions: Do You Need to Pre-Teach?

I started with an idea about how really creative teachers hook their students when presenting lesson plan activities. I continued the thought with a PowToon that would introduce the activity like mission, so chose the "Mission Impossible" PowToon template. I gathered the students in the room shut down the lights and presented the following:

The Powtoon itself was not sufficient to fully describe the activity, yet it provided a sense of excitement that got the students thinking about what they were going to be doing... I think mostly from the familiar theme music. The "zero tolerance" statement at the end drew several chuckles from the students that were really paying attention... to the point that I had to rewind, so everyone could be in on the joke. This simple clip seemingly opened the creative thoughts of the students without presenting them my input on what it might look like, so when they started their research for designs they weren't looking to replicate what they saw... they were looking for what they had in their mind.


As for the post assignment I wanted the pre-service teacher students to embed their created PowToon of awesomeness in their blog and then explain why they created the Powtoon and what lesson activity it was going to introduce. In this technology interaction I knew that many of the students had possibly never created a PowToon and many of them did Not have a Blog, which made this assignment, what I thought to be a good challenge. Knowing that there would be many questions, but more importantly, I thought it would offer the pre-service teacher students a chance to interact with the technology tools in a low risk situation with plenty of time to, if needed, to watch tutorials. And as pre-service teachers, I also knew, that this might provide them a glimpse of what it might be like to not know how to do something or at least struggle to some extent, which should serve them when faced with students that are struggling in their future classrooms. I also did Not include a grading rubric because that was going to be part of the follow-up homework assignment. A way, in which, they would have a first hand interaction in to why it's important for student to know what the grading expectations are for the assignment. The main criteria for grading the main assignment was as follows:

#1.  Did the student successfully create a blog spot? Yes or No 
#2.  Did the student create a PowToon? Yes or No 
#3. Did the student embed the PowToon in the Blog post? Yes or No
#4. Did the student submit the Blog Post link successfully in LiveText? Yes or No

If the answer was yes to all 4 questions then the student received full credit.

There were many struggles that I did Not anticipate like misunderstandings in the assignment directions. I also felt that many students dedicated or allotted a certain amount of time to complete the task and if it required more time then they really weren't prepared to struggle with the assignment any longer. I also felt that in many cases if I didn't or was unable to answer their questions within a minute or two then they lost interest in completing the assignment... or would have rather just been told "it's okay just submit what have." This led me to the realization that when planning lesson activities you must in some ways pre-teach the technology tools to most of the students because they are for the most part unwilling to interact with the content and teach themselves. The tricky part is what do you do with the students that either already know how or readily accept the challenge of self-learning. It is also quite tricky to figure out just how detailed you need to be when covering the technology tools. I find that many students have a limited understanding of basic technology concepts, which proves to be the barrier to understanding more complex operations. This also leads to a bit of cultural bias, in that due to age, millennial's are unfairly judged as knowing more about technology than they actually do, and I think I may be guilty of some of that bias thinking.   

Padlet Wall: Technology in the Classroom

The following is a Padlet wall for you add your thoughts about using technology in the classroom. Please feel free to follow the link to this Padlet and add your thoughts. Please include your name and some sort of visual meaning to enhance your ideas / thoughts.