After reading the ISTE National Educational Technology Standards for teachers, I feel a bit uneasy because I came to realize that I am not really a digital-age teaching professional, at least, not yet. I don’t have much opportunity to use technology in my classroom. I am a TOC for an English class at a private school in a small town in Mexico. The school does not have the latest technologies like most of the schools up north have. We are fortunate to have an OHP in the classroom. With an OHP we can create /present unusual and stimulating images on the screen that grab the attention of students, making them wish to communicate in English. With such activities students can be involved in discussions based on the images reflected on the screen and thus activate their communicative skills in the target language. Most of my students come from well to do Mexican families (I did a survey and found out that 98% are able to access computer and internet at home). I encourage students to do the research at home, cite the sources, and bring their own laptop to school for the presentation. On one occasion, a seventh grader brought his MAC laptop to the class for his group presentation and had his mom wait outside to take the expensive computer home again.
The other reason that I don’t have much chance to use digital tools is because I am a TOC. There is not much opportunity to initiate and continue with long term projects that enable the use of digital tools. However, in the very near future I am planning to use a VoiceThread, ( a slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows students to navigate slides and leave comments in many different ways, and students can participate at any time). Of course I have to keep reminding them to participate, they will never do it voluntarily unless I can make the topic very interesting.
Although I am unable to facilitate, design, or develop digital age learning experience and assessments, I think what I did best was #4: to promote a responsible digital citizenship. Since our school has no policy of prohibiting students from bringing their own digital devices to the school, many students took pictures of their classmates, classroom and even pictures of the teachers in the classroom teaching. They posted them in the social media sites like Facebook. My main concern is to make students become responsible digital citizenships. To make sure that they respect other’s privacy and understand the affects of digital footprints; and that a funny picture and a certain post can resurface years later as part of their digital footprint. Whatever they post on the internet today, will be there forever and that could one day affect their future opportunities.
I envied many of you here who are full time teachers and have full access to the latest technologies at schools. I have many ideas that I would like to try like using classroom weblog, creating our classroom Wikis, Cmaps, Pretzi, ToonDoo, Google Docs etc, all of these would be great tools to support language reading & writing skills. But I just don’t have the opportunity to do so yet. I have to wait until I have my own classroom.