Understanding Educational Technology #1: Authentic Technology Integration

Welcome to the first post of my blog focusing on issues, insights, aha moments, and anything else education-related. My goal is to give easy-to-digest snippets of my understanding of topics, with links to further reading about the topics I cover. My first few posts, including this one, are going to be semi-rapid fire on Educational Technology. I am currently enrolled in a Master of Secondary Education Program through Ball State–highly recommend–and part of the 5-week sprint course was to blog about the readings. To say the least, blogging got dropped until the final week of the course; I am going to roughly follow the progression of the course in the topics I cover. Enough about that, here is the meat of my first post.

Authentic Integration of Technology in the Classroom

What is ‘authentic’ integration of technology in the classroom? Well, I can tell you what integration of technology in the classroom is – using technology like laptops, tablets, 3D printers, content-area specific tools, and digital programs like word processors, PDF readers, the internet, online calculators like Desmos, 3D drafting software, and other content-area specific programs. I am using those types of things in my classroom, you might say. I thought so too as I was going through my various non-licensed education roles, education courses, and student-teaching. How wrong I was. I was using those tools as exactly that, tools. Understanding authentic integration of technology in the classroom starts with understanding that technology is more than a vessel to convey information. Dale S. Niederhauser (2013), a professor of Philosophy and the Department Chair of Curriculum and Instruction at West Virginia University, wrote, “teachers tend to use technology with their students in ways that are consistent with their (the teacher’s) beliefs about learning and pedagogy.” Or in other terms, how you use and understand technology is how you will integrate technology into your curriculum and lessons. ‘Authentic’ integration of technology is when students use technology to its fullest in ways that mirror how real-world people use it in their professions. Students ‘do’ the job of a person who would be using the technology. They feel that their assignment is meaningful beyond prepping for a test.

There are frameworks to help understand the process of integrating technology into the classroom. The ones that I read about were TPACK, SAMR, and Triple E. TPACK and Triple E are the larger focus for the Educational Technology Course I am currently finishing, but SAMR is the framework that immediately stood out to me and really helped be frame–because its a framework–what technology use in the classroom can and really should look like.

SAMR Framework (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition)

Lefflerd, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

As seen in the graphic, SAMR has 4 distinct stages of technology integration in the classroom, and those 4 stages are split into 2 sub-groups: Enhancement (Substitution and Augmentation) and Transformation (Modification and Redefinition). ‘Authentic’ technology use in the classroom falls mostly in the Transformation grouping, but does start to be achieved through Augmentation. Authentic technology use is geared towards students learning and understanding how technology is used to complete various tasks. Within the SAMR model, the idea is presented within Augmentation that students need to be taught how to best use the digital tools they are using. For example, within a word-processor, students should be taught and expected to use things like word-count, grammar/spell-check, auto-formatting functions, or the thesaurus. This ‘off-loading’ of extra mental tasks, as Niederhauser would put it, allows for more learning of the content-area specifics. Going beyond Augmentation, I am going to present a more streamlined graphic to help explain.

Jonathon Brubaker CC BY 4.0

This graphic really emphasizes how, with each rung of the ladder–or change of coffee recipe–learning is different. The goal of strong ‘authentic’ technology integration is to have your students ‘drinking’ the caramel macchiato and pumpkin spice regularly, occasionally ‘drinking’ a latte, and rarely ‘drinking’ straight coffee. So, how do I achieve serving my students caramel macchiatos and pumpkin spice regularly? With gradual and small shifts, not all at once. Having the progression from coffee to pumpkin spice–from substitution to Redefinition–is intentional. Getting to the point where an assignment can only be accomplished through the use of technology is not easy. Especially when the use of technology needs to be, and absolutely should be, more than just replacing your teaching of a lesson with a program like IXL. If that all sounds overwhelming. It is. And it was for me. 

The rest of my targeted posts on Education Technology will expand this concept of technology integration in the classroom and walk through how my understanding grew and evolved. The next post should be on how digital tools allow for meaningful learning. Thanks for reading.

References:

The SAMR Model of Technology Integration Article

Niederhauser, D. S. (2013). Learning from technology or learning with technology: Theoretical

perspectives on the nature of using technology in the classroom. In M. Clough, J. Olson, & D. Niederhauser (Eds.) The nature of technology: Implications for learning and teaching (pp. 249-­‐267). Rotterdam: Sense Publishing.