The word integrate gets on my nerves. Maybe I feel it’s been over used, or used in the wrong way when we talk about how we want technology to affect teaching and learning. What I want..is technology to be embedded into the classroom. Into the learning environment. I am tired of trying to integrate it into a process, a classroom, or a curriculum that was never made to integrate technology to begin with. No, what I want is to start at the very bottom and embed technology tools, skills, and standards into lessons, our classrooms, and our outcomes.
To integrate something means to find a place where it fits, to start with two separate pieces and see how you can fit them together. Like a puzzle, you have two pieces with different notches already in them…your job is to find out where the notches match up and where they don’t. Sometimes it takes a long time to put a puzzle together.
But what if we were this tree. What if we took these tools, skills, and standards and embedded them from the very beginning? What if we allowed our curriculum to grow around the technology, allowed the technology to be swallowed whole by the curriculum maybe even scraping the paint off in the process and in some cases modeling the technology skills and tools into something new and different to meet the needs of the curriculum.
What if we truly acted like technology was just part of us, part of education, part of educating students today. What if we start embedding it and stopped integrating it?
Technorati Tags: embedded technology