Over the last 2 weeks I’ve been thinking, pondering, studying, and actively pulling apart the third grade science curriculum. It has been a huge undertaking for me and has forced me to reflect back on a lot of skills and theories I learned during my undergraduate studies. While creating the scope and sequence I greatly appreciated the instruction during class next week because it gave me a springboard for creating my backwards design. The process I’ve gone through has been lengthy. First I printed out the entire core curriculum standards and then I went through and underlined each of the verbs within the standards, benchmarks and objectives. I categorized each bullet point in terms of Bloom’s Taxonomy and which level of understanding it reaches and I looked for trends and patterns. One of the longest parts in the process was deciding what order I would teach the material. I asked people for their advice and researched different scope & sequences online, and finally I set a loose outline of what I would be teaching in each month of the school year. The backwards design process took some review, mostly by referencing the article assigned for class I was able to recall enough schema on how to create a backwards design plan. I created assessments for the units and from the assessments and the standards I created my essential questions.
So how do you weave technology into that scope and sequence? That’s the real question here. I found myself deliberately thinking what type of technology I could weave into my assessments and consequently what type of technology would be used in individual lessons to enhance the final assessments for each unit. When I first started this project I felt really overwhelmed and clueless, so I did a lot of googling “technology scope and sequence” “technology and curriculum” “science assessment with technology” etc. I was pleased to find that many of the resources I found referenced things we’d already spoken about in class. On the Harford Schools website I discovered the SAMR model listed on the side of the homepage and I gave myself a figurative pat on the back for appropriately applying the principles of the SAMR model into my curriculum. The SAMR model gives the option to incorporate technology and different levels throughout the S&S, for example, sometimes we may substitute an online test instead of the ol’ pen and paper test, yet at other times we may modify the entire assessment instead of a poster with the moon phases the students may produce a collaborative video as evidence of their knowledge of forces applied to various objects and the motion it stimulates. When we design curriculum with technology in mind from the beginning, it makes the use of technology more purposeful and less accidental or as an after thought.
It becomes simple to use both general pedagogical content as well as content-specific technologies as we become familiar with our core curriculum. As leaders of technology we must shift our paradigm to not use tech just as an enhancement but to incorporate it seamlessly into every aspect of our curriculum. Every good teacher recognizes that reading comprehension has a place in each nook and cranny in the classroom – similarly as we shift to a new perspective we will see that technology is not just another subject to teach, but it becomes the way in which students are taught. It becomes a vehicle to bring learning to an elevated level, and if done correctly the students will learn the content-specific technology and how to use it.
Side note: When I create my next scope and sequence, I would have changed the process a bit by viewing the technology standards at the beginning of the process (at the same time as I was doing the other standards) so that I was familiar with them while going through the backwards design process. If I would have had a basic understanding of the technology standards earlier on, I would have specifically looked for ways to fulfill both standards.
Sources:
SAMR Model - https://sites.google.com/a/hartfordschools.net/hsd-k-12-technology-scope-and-sequence/
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