ISTE Standards: Possible Tools for Empowered Learning

Becoming an ISTE Certified Educator was a great experience. The certification is tool agnostic and competency-based so it has broader applications.  My best personal reason for earning the certification though is because it forced me to engage in deep reflection.  I felt confident that I was qualified. The question was how do I show it. This allowed me to think about how I do things. Doing this revealed areas where I could tweak things and grow professionally. I strongly suggest pursuing a ISTE Educator Certification. This series is an effort by me to share my thoughts and some resources for both the educator and student standards. Here are some tools and thoughts related to the Empowered Learner standard in the student standards.

Empowered Learners “leverage technology to take an active role in choosing, achieving and demonstrating competency in their learning goals, informed by the learning sciences.” Here are tools and strategies related to each each indicator in this strand. It should be noted that most, if not all, of these tools have several applications in multiple strands and indicators.

1. Students are asked to articulate and set personal learning goals.

• Flipgrid: Flipgrid allows teachers to set up video discussions by categories or “grids”. Students can use Flipgrid as a tool for setting goals, giving progress updates, and reflection.
• Technology Tools for Exit Receipts:
• Drive diary: Students in Google schools can use folders in Drive to keep an ongoing reflective diary.

2. Students build networks and customize their learning environments
in ways that support the learning process.

• Twitter: Twitter has so many uses in education at so many levels, it’s ridiculous.
• NING: NING can be used to create a contained online community

3. Students use technology to seek feedback that informs and improves their practice and to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways.

• Comments in Docs
• Google Forms

4. Students understand the fundamental concepts of technology operations, demonstrate the ability to choose, use and troubleshoot current technologies and are able to transfer their knowledge to explore emerging technologies.

• Allow choices: Give the students technology and delivery options.
• Give up control and solicit feedback: Allow students to contribute to the learning when it comes to learning choices.