Transferring Technology from the Middle School to the High School

For my current Certificate of Educational Technology and Informational Literacy (COETAIL) course, I was asked to reflect on how the previous courses have affected how I will teach this year. Last year I was teaching MS Humanities in grade 7. Technology was integrated in almost every aspect of my classes. My students using blogs, Google docs, nings, wiki spaces, you name it, I tried it. Anything and everything I learned about, I was able to immediately utilize in my class.

The bigger question is not HOW I am using it this year, but what am I NOT using this year.

Although I am a huge proponent of ePortfolios for HS students, I find I am using very little of my new knowledge in my every day lesson plans. So far I am not using anything else. I might use my class ning, Reading4Life, for independent writing, but the in-class discussions of literature this semester have been rich and full of discussions that have lead to fantastic discoveries about other novels.

In all fairness, I am currently overwhelmed by content. There is so much to teach and so many amazing resources already shared by my colleagues on the various literature units we are covering, I am struggling to keep up. There is so much to teach, so many ways to look at literature, see it, touch it. How can technology help me? In some ways, I know it can. This week we are looking at the poetry of Maya Angelou and nothing I can do will compare to hearing Angelou read her poem aloud on youtube. I get that.




But a wiki? Google docs? I am still unclear how to translate my newly acquired knowledge to the high school. This seems to be the digital divide in technology that educators seem to want to avoid. In the ES and MS, technology and all of the bells and whistles are amazing and I can see multitudes of ways they can enhance learning. But now, how do I integrate the knowledge and skills of web 2.0 into a high school classroom? I am still looking for answers.