Levels of Technology Integration

It’s fair to say that every school teacher in Australia is conscience of integrating some technology into their lessons by now. What that means, and how effectively it is done obviously varies from teacher to teacher, school to school. This chart aims to simply demonstrate what those levels of integration may be and hopefully can give clarity as to how to work up to level 4 integration.

Levels 1 and 2 and self-explanatory. I believe levels 3 is where the a huge percentage of ‘computer’ lessons in Australian classrooms sit. Level 4 should be our goal for most lessons. That is not to say that elements of app based learning and gamification are not valuable, they have a place, and an important role in classrooms. Playing an engaging and enjoyable app shooting aliens each time you correctly answer a multiplication question is a great way to reinforce prior learning and build basic maths skills. Word processing and presenting through Powerpoint (or a Web 2.0 equivalent like Prezi) are import skills also. However, this is not improving the educational outcomes of the lesson, it is reinforcing something that was taught through some another method previously. We should strive to extend the outcomes further with technology, achieve more because technology is available to integrate. We should take lessons that integrate technology further and engage students in 21CSS (21^st Century Skills for Students – click here to read more about those) while they are learning that important syllabus content at a higher level than possible without technology.

For a simple example we are all capable of; when making that glorious Powerpoint on Edmund Barton or Rainforests. Can we make it a live google doc with four children accessing the same document? This might force the students to ‘Collaborate and Communicate’. What is each slide dedicated too? Who will do which one? Is someone is charge of images and some information? That looks very different to each child doing their own, or even two children sitting at one computer together.

The Substitution Augmentation Modification Redefinition (SAMR) model is a very famous method of seeing how digital technology might impact teaching and learning. It was created by Dr Ruben Puentedura (http://www.hippasus.com/). Different activities within a regular teaching day might sit in different levels of the model. This model is not stating that every activity should aim to be in the Redefinition level. It’s a useful and efficient model offering teachers a way of understanding the results of the way technology has been used in a lesson activity.

This info graphic is probably the simplest break down of the SAMR model I’ve seen and it give some basic examples of each stage. It’s from https://www.principals.org

The levels of integration I’ve written are in agreement with the SAMR model. Rather than being focused on the opportunities for lesson tasks created by the technological integration as in the SAMR Model, the Levels of Technology Integration focus on how technology was used to improve educational outcomes within a lesson.

The Levels of Technology Integration focuses teachers on what is most important, educational outcomes for their students. We integrate technology to improve these outcomes. For example; we should not be taking the class to the computer lab to learn how to make flashing graphics on a new website. We should be taking the class to computer lab to make a ‘Fakebook’ page of a famous Prime Minister. This task would force students to expand through research their background knowledge of the person. Who their colleagues and friends were, what topics they felt strongly about and so on while teaching the ‘Digital Awareness’ and ‘Researching and Processing Information’ which are 21CSS. Student can than comment on each other’s Fakebook pages. In the latter case we are focusing on the syllabus content and educational outcomes, but use technology to improve student achievement of the outcome and teach them some 21CSS at the same time. This would also sit in the Redefinition level in the SAMR model.