Think about the various apps on your phone or tablet. What prompted you to download them? Did someone suggest you would like them? Were they hot apps at some point and you didn't want to miss out? Or were you searching for a specific need and tried them to see if they would help?
More often than not, apps are downloaded on a whim. A friend raves about one or everyone is addicted to one, so we add it to our device. Sometimes it becomes an app we use a lot, and sometimes it sits unused on our phones. There's nothing wrong with that. We have to try things out to see if we'll like them.
This random approach, however, is not a tactic that works well in education settings. When teachers (and I've been guilty of this) hear about a popular new app or tool and immediately deploy it in the classroom, we shortchange our students in multiple ways. First of all, we don't concentrate on what we want our students to learn when we focus on trying out a new tool. In our excitement, we push the tool rather than learning and thinking. Second, we don't offer our students a fair view of technology. Using a tool that doesn't truly match classroom goals means our students won't see the tool's full potential. They also won't understand how to thoughtfully choose tools to meet their needs.
Technology is a part of the journey rather than a goal in itself. As teachers, we must start with the goal in mind and determine which tools will best help us reach it. As a 4th and 5th grade teacher, I encouraged my students to blog and use wikis regularly. They blogged about their reading and were able to share their thinking, favorite books, and challenges. Blogs allowed us to share these thoughts far beyond the time we had in the classroom together. My students made connections with each other they would have otherwise missed. Wikis recorded our learning in different units. At the end of 5th grade, students in my district created a technology project linked to the social studies curriculum. We kept notes and lists about things we learned and links to various resources for each social studies unit to facilitate our projects later in the year.
When I moved from teaching 4th and 5th graders to teaching 1st graders, among the things that caused me concern (or terrified me, if I'm being honest) was how to integrate similar technology into my lessons. I loved all of the asynchronous, ongoing learning my upper-grade students had achieved using technology. I couldn't see how this would work with 1st graders who were not yet proficient readers and writers. I knew their thinking skills would far outpace their reading and writing abilities. So I began the search for a tool that would allow us to work in the same ways as blogs and wikis had for my upper-grade students.
I began with my goal in mind. I knew exactly what I wanted my students to be able to do and focused on finding a way to do it. I looked for primary teachers who were effectively using technology with their students. There were many exciting ideas out there, but it took a while to find the answer to my specific question.
When I did finally find the right tool (for me, it was VoiceThread), I was elated. My 1st graders and now my kindergartners use it regularly for many different purposes. It allows us to do all the things I wanted simultaneously—to share our thinking freely (because students can orally record themselves), to access classmates' thinking (by listening to the recordings), and to respond to each other. We've created threads in every content area and threads about our classroom, our school, and ourselves.
If I had stumbled across this tool and tried it out in the classroom, it might have turned out to be just as effective and meaningful as it is now. But it's equally likely that it would have fizzled quickly. A strong purpose and meaningful goals are what make a tool truly effective in a classroom setting.
Our classrooms are full of tools we use regularly. In my kindergarten classroom, those tools include various types of blocks, crayons, scissors, individual white boards, books, puppets, and computers. Sometimes students know exactly which tool they need for their learning, and sometimes students need a chance to freely explore different tools. Often, I carefully choose a tool (or tools) that best supports a given skill, concept, idea, or challenge.
Technology is fun, for teachers and for students. In the classroom, however, we must also make sure we use these tools in meaningful ways. When we wisely use the technology available to us, the entire class benefits.