Implementing changes, even on a small scale, can be overwhelming, especially when those changes have the potential to affect a group of impressionable young students. As with any major decision, it is important to consider how you will introduce the change, how it will affect the current situation, and what the potential benefits are. As an educator, keeping up with current technology trends can prove to be a challenge. It can be difficult to deicide how to best utilize different forms of technology that will not only hold the students’ interests, but also improve the learning process for them while not impeding the way you want to manage your classroom. The following 5 questions have been developed to assist you in deciding how to best incorporate technology into your classroom. Following each question are brief explanations of the strategies I used to enhance the students’ use of technology in my classroom.

As the students begin to see the relevance in their learning, we have put into context how we are going to challenge them to meet the expectations. In The First Days of School: Part 3, I mentioned that I correlate their level of competency in education to their future success in the world of work. Regardless if they attend a post-secondary institution, the ultimate goal is to find a career that each student enjoys and can provide them with a self-sustaining wage. When placed in this context, the students see the relevancy of becoming knowledgeable and skilled.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of being in New York for the Apple launch of iBooks 2, iBooks Author and the new iTunes U. In the days leading up to the event, I must have read 20 articles about the speculation surrounding Apple’s Education Announcement. From what I had read, it was clear that Apple wanted to disrupt the textbook industry. I thought about the many ways a new “GarageBand for books” could possibly revolutionize education. Being an advocate for integrating technology into Career and Technical Education, I was thinking of ways in which students could work independently through a competency-based curriculum, thus creating a differentiated learning environment. This would provide the instructor the means to work one-on-one with students who need remediation. With a special needs population of over 45% at my school, I see the value in creating learning tools to further assist students in learning new material. Now that is not to say that you can’t do this with current technology, but there is something transformational about the way kids learn with an iPad (at least from my perspective of what I have witnessed in my class).