Four Principles for True Technology Integration

Information users need to become knowledge creators. 
How do we teach students and teachers to manage information glut? How do we teach them to locate the best information? Most importantly, how do we teach teachers to assign projects that will require learners to take accurate, relevant information and create new knowledge and discoveries? Answering these questions is imperative for matching the best information with the right learner and critical for teachers seeking to move their students' thinking past basic regurgitation to wisdom.

Individual knowledge acquisition needs to tap into global collaboration. 
Our students and teachers need to learn how to use the Net to locate key people who can support their learning plans and communities where knowledge and know-how reside. There is also great value in looking for places for teachers and students to post their own learning and expertise for others to share. See Resources, below, for some of my favorite sharing places.

There's power in connecting learning groups for mutual benefit. 
With Internet and email access, students from two or more different cities or countries can collect information, share their findings and pool their ideas together to create an end product that is the result of cross-cultural ideas. Over the past two months my students have worked alongside a class in Tel Aviv, Israel in an online project called "We the Children..." Both classes have examined the 1989 United Nations Rights of the Child in an effort to evaluate how well this charter has been implemented over the years. They defined criteria for a "Safe Place" and then evaluated the safety of their immediate environment. Student writing will be posted on the project Web page. Through this project, my students have been exposed to the stark contrast between personal safety in Canada and Israel. They have had the opportunity to email Israeli students and discover that in spite of terrorism, teenagers on the other side of the world share interests and concerns much like their own.

Behind every technology-rich learning environment is... 
Finding inspired people who are willing to discover new ways to use technology more effectively is key to success. Behind every technology-rich learning environment is a bold administrator who is willing to follow the sometimes-undefined dreams of a technology integration teacher. Freeing the integration teacher to create online learning opportunities and train teachers when server space and budget and time concerns scream for attention is nothing short of courageous.

Over 50 years ago, Vannevar Bush wrote a visionary article called "As We May Think". Here he predicted our need for new technologies to both create and help manage the knowledge explosion. Bush also predicted a new breed of knowledge workers called "pathfinders," who would help establish linkages and cross-references to information resources that would be accessed by these devices. Could the pathfinders that he described here be the administrators and teachers who are brave enough to lose sight of the learning shore long enough to create a wildly new way of learning?