After organizing my ideas for TPACK and understanding the learning abilities of my students I need to start to implement my ideas. This stage of the process I will briefly go over some ideas for each of the 21st century fluency ideas. For more about the fluencies, click the button below.
Below are my ideas for implementing technology into the classroom to address each fluency for a given standard.
Tyler's Fluency Ideas
Implementation
I am going to focus on the learning of the words and definitions stage of solution fluency - define. I thought this might be one of the hardest stages to get the kids motivated in. We have implemented memrise.com into the curriculum. It was a collaborative effort with other teachers in my school, but we are creating a study guide for our Life Science book here.
Memrise screen-shot of the material.
The students use this software to study the words from each chapter. On the last test, the students missed the most questions in the vocabulary section of the test, so we decided that this would be the best area to try something new. This software will allow them to study easily, with picture examples, the words at their own pace and at their own leisure. They also have a leader-board to see how they compare with other students in the class and out of the class. The software also reminds them to study after a certain amount of time since they first learned the word helping them refresh and reengage with the material.
Memrise screen-shot of an example word for studying.
Challenges
The students need an email account and access to a computer and/or a smart phone to study. It can take a lot of work uploading all the information to the site to get it up and running, unless it has been done already. We have noticed that there should be some oversight on the message boards and uploading of the 'mems' (pictures) to watch out for bullying or inappropriate uploads.
Our students have all submitted their email addresses for this implementation. We have just introduced the students to it, so we haven’t seen the full results of the implementation yet, but the kids seemed very excited to use it upon seeing the preview of how it works and how they will use it. I’m in high hopes that this will be a successful implementation of technology into the classroom. I have been using the software myself to learn and I enjoy it, so I am confident that the students will enjoy it as well.
As we move forward, we plan to upload all of our books onto the site for their ability to study them and there are already thousands of uploaded books that the kids can learn from outside of our curriculum, and in the attempt to get more points, I hope perhaps they expand into them one day, but only time will tell.
Resources
Common Core State Standards initiative. (2013, March 29). Common Core Standards. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/
Crockett, L., Jukes, I., & Churches, A. (2011). Literacy is Not Enough. (first ed). 21st Century Fluency Project Inc.: 21st Century Fluency Project.