A team at the Prairie Lakes Area Education Agency in Iowa has designed a template of questions intended to better help teachers throughout the country integrate technology in their classroom.

"That template is trudacot, a free protocol intended to help facilitate educator conversations about deeper learning, student agency, and technology integration. Trudacot is an acronym for Technology-Rich Unit Design And Classroom Observation Template," according to eSchoolNews.com.

The template is designed based on what kinds of goals teachers and school leaders hope to accomplish through the use of technology. The whole process must start with educators in the given school setting clear, obtainable goals for its classes.

For instance, if the goal was to get students to use technology in a way that mirrors "real world work," the question set would include questions such as: "Are students learning discipline-specific and -appropriate content and procedural knowledge? If yes, is student work focused around big, important concepts central to the discipline (not just minutiae)?" according to the article.

If the goal was instead to get students to use technology for deeper more creative thinking, the question set would ask questions about the creativity of the instruction and the students' ability to reflect afterwards.

After the educators answer the template's questions, the team of researchers suggests educators meet in small groups to discuss what has and has not worked.

Educators should ask, according to the article, "'If we wanted the answer(s) to the question(s) to be different, how could we redesign this to make that desired answer happen instead?’ This is where the powerful conversations occur; this is the work we should be doing with educators."

So far, the developers of Trudacot have found the template to be extremely helpful in brain-storming and idea generation for integrating technology as opposed to an after-the-fact evaluation process. Further, they warn against educators using the template as merely a checklist to compare lessons and units against.

To download the Trudacot template, click here. To read the full article, click here, and please comment your thoughts below.

Article by Nicole Gorman, Education World Contributor

05/26/2015