How to Effectively Integrate Technology into Your Lesson Plans

A Simple Guide for Enhancing Your Classroom Tech Use

Don’t Do This

Teachers often express a certain level of frustration over how to best integrate technology into their lesson plans. It is not that they don’t want to use technology, or that they don’t understand how to use a given app or service, it’s just that they’re unsure how to best utilize said technology within the context of their lesson plans in a way that is more than just arbitrary replacement or “fluff.” In truth, this is so often where professional development trainings fail teachers — we’re always shown what a tool can do and how to use it, but we’re not helped to understand when and why to use it. So that’s what this post is all about — the “when and why” of technology integration.

Step 1: Identify Your Teaching Strategy

Any halfway decent lesson starts with a consideration of what teaching strategy is going to be most effective for a given bit of content, skill or concept. Of course, the vast majority of teachers recognize this and do it every time they sit down to plan. However, many teachers don’t recognize that this is also the first step toward effective tech integration because different technologies fit better in different teaching contexts. Thus, you have to have a firm grasp of the teaching strategies you want to employ before considering what technologies best fit a lesson. The technology should not dictate the way in which a lesson is taught, it should support it.

Step 2: Identify Key Components of Success

What important things have to happen in order to make a certain teaching strategy most effective? What does the teacher need to bring to the table? How do the students need to behave? Developing a list (even if it’s just inside your head) as to what makes a given strategy successful helps you hone in on the technologies that can help you bring about that success.

For example, let’s suppose you’ve chosen direct instruction or lecture as your primary teaching strategy in a given lesson. Your list of criteria for success may look like this:

• Engaging delivery of content
• A means of keeping students focused / on-task
• Some type of formative assessment
• Students employing solid note-taking strategies

A list of this nature helps crystalize exactly what you’re hoping to see in a lesson, and it’s at this level that you can start to consider what tech tools can help you achieve these objectives.

Step 3: Find the Best Tech Tools for your Goals

Perhaps developing your list has already spawned some ideas, or perhaps this is where you begin to explore online resources or reflect back on some previous “How-To” tech trainings through a new lens. This is also the level at which your friendly neighborhood technology integrator can be most valuable to you. Teachers who come to me asking, “What tool can help me up the engagement level of my whole-class lectures?” or “I’m looking for a quick open-ended formative assessment tool” are easy to support. Since they already know what they want to achieve, I better know how to help them! For example, looking at the list above, here are some things I might suggest:

• Engaging delivery of content
  -> Nearpod can certainly help make an old Powerpoint much more lively and interactive
  -> Use your iPad and iMovie to record, edit and “flip” a lecture
  -> Try emaze or Adobe Spark to build your presentations with more visually engaging features.
• A means of keeping students focused / on-task
  -> Use Apple Classroom to surveil students’ iPad behaviors in real time
  -> Set up a Google integrated Assignment on Schoology to allow you to spot check students’ notes in real time
• Some type of formative assessment
  -> Nearpod can again help with this goal
  -> Padlet is quick and easy enough that students can get to it and back to notes again quickly and efficiently even mid-lecture
  -> Use Respondus Lockdown Browser to lock students into a “lecture test” where they answer a set of open-ended questions as you deliver. They can’t go anywhere else as you’re teaching, and you can always go back and open up the test to be reviewable after the fact
• Students employing solid note-taking strategies
  -> There are numerous note-taking templates available in both MS Word and Google Docs. You can also create your own to share with students via Schoology or the Google Drive.
  -> Consider supplementary videos on note-taking from Edpuzzle or Playposit.
  -> Visual note-taking strategies can be supported by programs like coggle and inspiration
  ->Remember, this skill needs to be modeled! It’s also important that you require cognition during note-taking, which means students should be shortening, abbreviating, summarizing, and rewording as they take notes. If students take notes on a device, make sure that your expected note-taking format requires they do such!

As you can see, by employing this strategy it becomes much easier to see where, when and why certain tech tools can be inserted into a lesson plan in a way that truly improves it. Give it a try and see if it helps you recognize where the potential for good tech integration exists within your own lesson plans. You may be surprised at how little you have to alter your approach to allow tech to be more effective for you. If you have any questions, about this subject or anything else related to tech integration, just drop me a line!