TECHNOLOGY AND MEDIA RESOURCES 1

Integration of Technology and Media Resources

Nicholas Kowalski

Regent University

In partial fulfillment of UED 495 Field Experience ePortfolio, Fall 2018

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Introduction

In this 21st century society a mastery of technology has become not only

beneficial but also absolutely crucial. On top of a mastery of technology, students are also

exposed to an innumerable amount of media resources. Since students will have to grow

up in a world where technology and media has to be properly navigated and mastered in

order to survive, it then becomes the duty of a 21st century teacher to make sure that

lesson are properly planned in order to best integrate and train students on these skills.

Rationale

Since integrating technology and media resources is inextricably tied to how a

teacher plans their lessons both of these artifacts that have been provided are lesson plans

that focus on utilizing technology and navigating media resources. The first of the two

centers around a lesson in which students are working together in order to analyze

documents and answer guided reading questions in order to synthesize the information

from all above documents leading to the students attempting to answer the very large,

cumbersome question of “Why did Americans head west during the mid to late 19th

century?” This lesson could have been about 20 years ago and hit all of the same content

points that it hits today. However, I was able to integrate the use of technology into this

assignment to better help to bolster to skills of these students. Students in this lesson use

their Chromebooks and shared Google doc links to search through this information. They

are also asked to share their Google doc with their partners in order to ensure that they

are able to collaborate in this new technological method. Part of integrating technology is

about simply that; integrating technology into lessons that could have been previously
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done without it. This lesson integrates not just the use of Chromebooks, but also the

sharing of Google docs, which have allowed students to work on the same document at

the same time, thusly collaborating in a new and exciting way.

The second artifact is a lesson in which students not only have to use technology,

but also navigate media in order to obtain information that they seek. This was a lesson

that focused on inventions and adaptation that helped to settle the Great Plains. First they

worked in pairs to look up these inventions in order to understand what they looked like

so they could identify them in old photographs that they were analyzing. Secondly they

had to use the Internet as a resource in order to discover why these were invented in the

first place, what they did, and how they helped to settle the Great Plains. A large portion

of this assignment is navigating the Internet as a media resource. This is not only helpful

to completing the lesson, it’s crucial. Students had to figure out how to sift through

bucket of information and sources in order to discover ones that were genuine and

helpful.

Reflection

Technology and media resource integration can help to engage students by tying

education into something that has become increasingly necessary in the average student’s

social life; social media. By using social media and cell-phone apps as a means of

educating students in the classroom, we find that students are more engaged in the

material. This does create more opportunities for distraction in the short-term, which is

true, but it also creates an opportunity for teachers to facilitate the necessary skills of

being able to curb distractions when working in an online environment full of them

(Koroleva & D.O., 2018, p. 425-426).

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Integrating technology and media resources into lessons, as has been already

started, is essential for students to survive in the 21st century world, but it can also help to

further close the opportunity gap that exists among student from different socioeconomic

backgrounds. Students that grow up in a lower socioeconomic group often lack the same

technological resources as their other peers, because of this they can often find that these

important technology- based skills are much harder to obtain. Integrating technological

skills into lessons at school (as well as proper media resource use) can help these students

to overcome the lack of resources at home. Therefore giving them an equal shot further

down the line (Devlin & McKay, 2016, p. 100).

Integrating technology into education doesn’t just mean integrating it into lessons

to benefit students. It can also help administrations to take steps forward and keep their

institutions relevent and engaging. With technology we can create programs that can

make institution wide data, and logistical problems a thing of the past (Stoddart, 2015, p.

587). Viginia Beach City Public Schools is currently in the middle of such an overall.

They have been introducing a city wide program that helps students to have access to

information, assignments, grades, etc., but also allows teachers and administrators easy

access to information, lesson plans and data.

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Resources

Devlin, M., & McKay, J. (2016). Teaching students using technology: Facilitating

success for students from low socioeconomic status backgrounds in

Australian universities. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology , 32

(1), 92-106.

Koroleva, & D.O. (2018). Potential for Using Mobile and Networking Technologies in

Teaching. Russian Education & Society , 60 (5), 422-438.

Stoddart, P. (2015). Using educational technology as an institutional teaching and

learning improvement strategy? Journal of Higher Education Policy &

Management , 37 (5), 586-596.