Teaching students to use technology PROPERLY!!

When I look at the Maryland standards for technology use, a number of things come to mind. I am lucky enough that our school lends itself to the state’s technology standards more than usual because each student is required to have a personal laptop. A program that I use regularly to integrate learning and positive use of personal technology is Remind.com. Remind is great. It is a program that allows teachers to communicate with students via texts to their phone, but everything is done through the app, which removes the need to exchange personal phone numbers, which in my opinion is unprofessional for a teacher to do. The program on the computer allows you to send messages at specific times, and also allows students to send messages to you, which you can choose to delay receiving during your preferred hours. There is even an option for parents to opt in on the texts from the teachers by scanning a QR code or logging a passcode into their phone. This program allows students to use their phones in a constructive, scheduling manner and prevents them from making excuses about forgetting critical assignments. One challenge that I have with students is their expectation that information should not need to be researched and that it should be instantly easy to find (such as on Wikipedia). Students complain that they cannot find answers to questions, mostly because they type in two or three key words, never phrases, and then give up when they cannot use Wikipedia. Proper research techniques are critical to the success of any modern course, and it is incredibly frustrating to have the students give up so easily. This is where the WebQuests quickly become useful. A WebQuest is a series of questions that lead a student to find resources and then report from those sources on a particular subject. In my class, students would be citing evidence from scientific and technical readings from our subscription based databases such and JSTOR. To do so, they would also have to outline what the papers and journals highlight, ideally using the abstract to gather the most essential information and applying it to the key terms and ideas to class in an abstract manner.