OETS

These standards all seem geared towards one main goal: helping students to understand and be able to effectively use technology and digita media to further their educations and life experiences. Since technology is our future, it is very important that we as educators are not only technologically literate, but that we are working to help our students become the same - not only literate, but technologically ethical and productive, as well.

A few strategies:
1. Creativity and Innovation: Use products like Google Sheets, Presentations or Drawings to create projects that demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of classwork. These can be Powerpoint-type presentations, creative drawings or comic book pages, or data collection in order to create book reports, research projects, textual analysis, etc.

2. Communication and Collaboration: Share these projects on the web with other members of the class - even creating them together, simultaneously while in different physical places - in order to help each other better understand the subject matter and to work together cooperatively.  These projects can then be published to the web, shared with the whole class, or even the whole department or district.

3. Research and Information Fluency: Help students learn how to conduct web-based research - not only effectively, but also discerningly, safely, intelligently, and legally - by assigning research papers, and then demo-ing how to conduct research in class. Also, products like Google Sheets or Excel can help students gather and analyze data in an organized, effective manner - help students understand how to collect and compile that data, again by demonstrating in class.

4. Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making: Technology can really help students get work done quickly; however, they need to be aware of the work they are doing, how they are doing it, and why they are choosing to use specific media. Helping students be aware of and literate in a variety of tools can help them then make more well-informed decisions about how best to go about a project, paper, or assignment.

5. Digital Citizenship: Students must know that many of the things they do on the internet can be accessed by any one at any time. Facebook, Twitter, publishing projects to the web - these are all things that are public on the internet. Students must therefore be made aware of how to go about using the internet in a responsible, legal way. Plagiarism is a huge problem as well, that must be gone over explicitly with students - since so much more information is now open to them, it is hard to know what constitutes illegality and what doesn't. Make sure your students know!

6. Technology Operations and Concepts: This ties back in to showing students a variety of technological tools to help them grow as learners. Things like Screenr, Dropbox, and the Google platform, as well as communication tools like Skype and Twitter, can all be utilized very effectively to further learning.