Technology needs to be integral to my interactions with students. I want to be more deliberate in identifying, recognizing, and optimizing my students’ backgrounds and abilities with technology, all which far surpass mine. Once understood more completely, I am confident that we can use this knowledge to “show what they know” in many traditional areas of literacy activities. I am confident that technology will allow for more interactive and inviting projects and products as well as multigenre, multidimensional, and multicultural. The challenge will be balancing quality work with technology glitter and glamor. I have seen student presentations that are dependent on cut and paste technology of other people’s work, and there is limited personally developed work by the student. I want students to create their own technological products since they need to do more than find attractive sites that shadow their own efforts.
Having said that, if students embrace the responsibility of this level of development, the results should be stellar. The multimodal aspects of student work should add to the idea of multiple intelligence theory and allow students to tap into strengths as well as develop new areas of interest and abilities. I will ask students to develop their own rubrics for given work, asking them to show they know the areas of importance in their efforts and can determine elemental concepts, interactions, and interrelationships. Note that these requirements ask for quality of effort not just flash of technology, a trait I have seen in many student works emphasizing technology. I embrace the use of technology as long as the level of expectations remains the same or raises, adding energy and effort in the curriculum and vibrance in the expression.
