The teacher I interviewed is a high school biology teacher in the Denville school district. The teacher has taught for about five years and teaches 9th to 12th grade. I was quickly surprised to learn that she knew what NETS was when I mentioned it at the start of the interview. She told me that her school was not implementing the standards at this point in time and has no time frame when it will. The teacher I interviewed actually knew a lot about the standards and their intentions. She also said that it wasn’t as popular in New Jersey. She said that schools generally just followed the state standards and would only change if the standards themselves changed. She contemplated whether the standards were more popular in other countries as she mentioned that the, ISTE who organized the standards, were an international organization. I was quite surprised to learn that she knew a lot about NETS because not a lot of local teachers were familiar with it according to some of my classmate’s posts. She knew a good amount of the standards and the ISTE organization.
The teacher did mention that technology was heavily integrated into their school. Every classroom had at least three desktop PC’s and a Smartboard. Students were taught basic navigation through Windows operating systems and applications. Every student created a school Gmail account which promoted file sharing and messaging to complete projects. Google docs was a very important online application in which the students used for group projects too. This correlates with my experiences at Montclair State University and this class itself, as I have recently learned how useful Google Docs is. So, to some degree the school did fulfill some of the NETS standards.
As a future educator I would speak in favor of having my school uphold the NETS standards. It encourages them to be fluent with technology and understand that it can be used as a tool to aide in research and group work. It also teaches them how to safely and responsibly use technology to avoid any legal and ethical problems. While it’s good for technology to be used as an aide for curriculum standards, I feel it should also be taught concurrently with the lesson because of its real world applications for students. After all, the NETS standards only further promotes leadership, collaboration and creativity. I would push for the standards in schools that already have a lot of technology and also use it as a reason to get more funding for schools that don’t have a lot of technology. Either, I feel there is no harm in implanting these standards.
Rob,
ReplyDeleteExcellent post. I was not able to dive into the OS aspect of the school's technology, so I was very interested in reading your research on it. It seems as though many schools have integrated the standards into their districts, regardless if they knew of the standards or not. Having the standards gives a great guideline as to how technology can directly benefit the classroom.
Once again, a great read.
-Joe