The Texas Center for Education Technology (TCET) has put up a website that can be very beneficial to educators. Many teachers may not realize that the TEKS for technology applications has 4 strands – Foundation, Manipulating Data, Acquiring Information, and Communication/Publishing. Even more teachers may be unaware of how to implement each of the strands for technology. This webpage link will take you directly to the website to explain in easy to understand terms what technology communication and publishing looks like in your classroom. To make it even better, scroll down a bit further and you will actually be given lessons to use in your classroom based on grade levels. This website has many positives to its use for educators. Now the reason I selected this site was because I was in need of assistance on communication and publishing. Not everyone is in the same boat with me, and your area of need may be in acquiring information, foundations, or manipulating data. All you have to do to find useful information and strategies for each of these strands is to click on the Venn Diagram. You are quickly redirected to the same type of webpage for each strand selected.
Even when things look so good, you know there has to be bad news and there is some bad news that comes with this website. If you have any questions that come up based on your newly acquired information, this is not the site for you. There is not interactive session for questions or even a FAQ section. You will have to get those answers somewhere else. Also, even though the information found on the site can be of great use in your classroom, this site was posted in 2001 and from what I could see has not been recently updated in the past few years.
The 21st Century learner does not learn the same way we learned growing up. We are 8 years into the 21st Century as we still are not getting ‘it’! As educators we need to become an agent for change. We need to understand to the best of our knowledge how we can use technology within our classrooms to prepare our students to do well in their lives outside of school, not in school. By understanding these strands perhaps you too can start implementing more technology use in your classroom. This website can help you do just that!
