Running head: EDU 214 final project

Final Project
Gabriela Martinez
10/12/15
College of Southern Nevada

ABC Community School

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Final Project
Educators abandoning teaching and learning with technology would cause for a major
decline in student progress and achievement. Without the resources available to us now, we
couldnt expect much of any incline or steadiness in students being able to be academically
successful. Educators need to employ the very skills they are passing along to their students.
They need to: curate, collaborate, communicate, critically think, and create. All of this is best
accomplished through the use of tools of technology. An education without technology does not
prepare our students with the skills that their world will require. Technology should be
ubiquitous in education. (Whitby, 2014)
Without the preparation our students deserve for their future, many skills that could have
been easily learned from a K-12 environment could be severely affected. Students who are
deprived of essential skills such as typing, or knowing how to use word processing software.
Imagine a world in which the future leaders of our country couldnt type faster than ten words
per minute because they lack the skills they should have learned in grade school. This is the 21st
century and without technology in our classroom, what are we even preparing our students for?
How will they know how to apply for jobs online let alone write their own resumes?
We are in the day and age in which we need technology in order to research information
and use that information to interpret data into our own understanding. The skills that educators
are emphasizing more and more are skills of: curating information, analyzing information,
understanding information, communicating information in various forms, collaborating on
information both locally and globally, ultimately, creating information for the purpose of
publishing and sharing. (Whitby, 2014)
All jobs revolve around the use of technology and without this lesson, how are students to
adjust being in the real world? Yes, good teachers can teach without technology, but to what
end, if the student will need to master technology to compete, or even exist in a technologydriven environment? If the mind isnt challenged through education it will only atrophy
resulting in an underdeveloped adult that has no will to advance or ambition to succeed. An adult
with no will to advance or ambition to succeed wont help our society to obtain its optimal end
result. (Whitby, 2014)
It may be time to shift the discussions to what we need our kids to learn and how they
will implement that learning in our culture, and continue to learn, as the lifelong learners, which
we, as educators, supposedly strive to make them to be. In order to better educate our cultured
Americans, we must first implement technology based learning into our curriculums. Our main
focus should be on the students and what is best for them. If we dont change our perspectives to
believe in what will eventually be better for our students then we wont be succeeding as
educators in any which way. If we are educating our children to live and thrive in their world,
we cannot limit them to what we were limited to in our world. (Whitby, 2014)
America wouldnt be the great nation that it is today without technology and it wont
continue to stay this way without continuing to incorporate technology in the future curriculums
of our schools. The American Dream cannot be fulfilled without technology being learned in
classroom settings and an American without a dream is no American at all.

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Identification of Standards
Standard 1: Creativity and innovation - Students demonstrate creative thinking, construct
knowledge, and develop innovative products and processes using technology. a. Apply existing
knowledge to generate new ideas, products, or processes b. Create original works as a means of
personal or group expression c. Use models and simulations to explore complex systems and
issues d. Identify trends and forecast possibilities. This standard shows how a students creativity
while using technology enhances their overall learning capabilities without the technology-based
project itself. Without being able to use models to show our overall results we cannot have
students teach each other within their own creations.
Standard 4: Critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making - Students use
critical thinking skills to plan and conduct research, manage projects, solve problems, and make
informed decisions using appropriate digital tools and resources. a. Identify and define authentic
problems and significant questions for investigation b. Plan and manage activities to develop a
solution or complete a project c. Collect and analyze data to identify solutions and/or make
informed decisions d. Use multiple processes and diverse perspectives to explore alternative
solutions. This standard helps students use their critical thinking skills and incorporate them into
a technology-based assignment so that they can use the research they conducted to create
projects that use appropriate digital tools and resources to help other students understand the data
that they are trying to explain.

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Name of lesson:
Bar Graph Bears
Grade Level Appropriateness:
2nd Grade
Technology Content Standard Addressed:
Standard #1: Creativity and innovation Students - demonstrate creative thinking,
construct knowledge, and develop innovative products and processes using technology
Other Content Standard Addressed:
Standard #4: Critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making - Students use
critical thinking skills to plan and conduct research, manage projects, solve problems, and
make informed decisions using appropriate digital tools and resources.
Objective:
The objective of this lesson is for students to be able to separate colored plastic bears into
their own color groups and be able to make a bar graph showing the amount of bears
there are in each color.
Materials needed to facilitate the lesson:
PowerPoint, different colored plastic bears, work area.
Suggested group size:
Groups in pairs would be optimal.
Procedures:
1. Gather students attention.
2. Pick out paired groups to work together.
3. Give each pair a handful of randomly drawn out colored bears.
4. Allow students to work together to separate bears into different groups based on
matching colors.
5. Have students count how many bears there are of each color and write it down.
6. Open up PowerPoint and have students tell you how many of each colored bear there
was so you can type in the data. Make sure this is on the big screen so the kids can
see.
7. Create a bar graph from the data to allow students to see how much comparison there
is between the differences of the colors in bears.
Assessment:
9-10 points Student engaged well in activity and stayed well on-task.
7-8 points Student engaged well in activity and was on-task most of the time.
5-6 points Student engaged fairly well in activity and was on-task most of the time.
3-4 points Student did not engage well in activity but was on-task most of the time.
1-2 points Student did not engage very well in activity nor stay on-task.

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Bar gr aph be ars

Red

Blue

Yellow

8
7

7
6
5

4
3

2
1
0

Number of bears

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References
Whitby, T. (2014, January 4). Learning Without Technology. Retrieved October 10, 2015, from
https://tomwhitby.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/learning-without-technology/