Oregon Educational Technology Standards

These new standards seek to educate students to be technolocially literate through the responsible, informed integration of technology in all content areas. Teachers are responsible for preparing students to be citizens in society, and part of today's society is the use of all kinds of technology in every walk of life.

Communication and Collaboration
To meet this standard, I could develop a class blog for my 5th grade class. All assignments and projects would be listed on this blog so that students and their parents could see what was happening in class at any given time, and parents would know what their students were supposed to be working on. Students could also post responses to questions on the blog and read other students' responses.

Creativity and Innovation
Students could create informational videos in groups using iMovie to teach the class and the public about an environmental hazard in their community. Students could use cameras to videotape themselves talking about the issue and touring the site of the hazard. The result could be a Public Service Announcement informing the rest of the class what they could do to alleviate the problem.

Research and Information Fluency
For math and science, students could use Google Sheets to record and analyze data from an in class experiment. The students could continue work on the assignment at home, and then make their spreadsheets available for viewing to the teacher or the whole class.
Teachers could also implement a research project where every student had the same topic, but was assigned a different resource from where to gather their information. This would not only teach students about how to use resources to find information, but also what the pros and cons are of different kinds of sources.

Challenges:
When using technology in classroom activities, particularly homework assignments, it is important to be sensitive to the fact that not all students may have access to a particular technology that you want to use. It is crucial that teachers make sure all students have the opportunity to complete an assignment at school if they don't have access at home.
Another challenge to implementing technology in classes is the potential resistance of parents to social networking sites or other internet "evils". This is where it is important for teachers to stress the digital citizenship standard, both for the safety of the students, and to ease parents' minds.