August 2002 — Features
Print this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
Teacher vs. Computer. Where Educators Stand in the Technology Revolution
Instructional technology and the World Wide Web offer powerful teaching resources that provide educators with a limitless wealth of information and shared professional practices. My teaching partner and I spent four years infusing instructional technology and online resources into our interdisciplinary curriculum. After four years of adjustments and developments to our teaching philosophy, we arrived at a middle ground where we continued using our constructivist teaching philosophy to create meaningful learning experiences for our students, giving them the opportunity to learn sophisticated computer and research skills.
Our team-teaching philosophy creates student-centered learning environments; encourages a "constructivist" (Lynch 1997) approach to learning; and implements interdisciplinary lessons, projects and inquiry-based labs. Our middle school employs a full-inclusion classroom model, and we are successful in creating differential lesson plans for students with Individual Education Plans and/or Section 504 Behavioral Plans. Our teaching team encourages students to use the Harvard Medical School style of note taking. This style of note taking requires students to locate new information from different textbooks and scholarly resources, collaborate with one another to put the new information in their own words, and graphically organize the information in designs that assist their understanding of the new material.
Our students are required to create collages and posters that demonstrate their comprehension of the new material. These hands-on learning experiences give students the opportunity to build upon their previous knowledge, exchange information and construct new knowledge. Students are then assessed using authentic methods, such as learning journals, reading and writing portfolios, as well as more traditional grading procedures, such as multiple-choice and essay tests. The major objective of our teaching philosophy is for students to practice higher-order thinking skills in addition to their basic reading, writing and arithmetic skills.
A Wealth of Online Resources
Without the use of online resources, it took numerous hours to develop, research and produce our lesson plans. But as the Web became more indispensable, we were able to use an abundance of online teacher resources to gather new ideas for our lesson plans and projects. Our team-planning time is now far more productive because, rather than developing our ideas from scratch, we are now able to develop our lesson plan ideas from shared resources. As a result, we are able to focus our team-teaching time on differentiating our lessons and projects to meet our students' needs. While we have become more comfortable using the Web and various software applications to expand our lesson plan ideas, as well as develop handouts and electronic presentations, we have also become more comfortable asking students to employ these instructional tools for their own benefit.
